Mr. Speaker, I personally worked for many years in volunteer organizations and in the health care system, where I came in contact with young offenders. The residential facilities were in fact operated by health and social services. I was in a position to observe that when effort was invested in rehabilitating those young people, the success rate was nearly 88%, as the member for Richmond—Arthabaska was just saying.
I was in close contact with those young people. I went to visit the residential facilities and I saw how young people were treated. I imagined that if those young people had been 18 years old or more and had ended up in prison on their first offence, as the Conservative government is now proposing, they would have been completely traumatized. These were of course young people in difficulty who had committed significant acts, acts that could be characterized as criminal. Most of them, however, were on their first offence. Those young people would have been completely lost to society.
On an annual basis, it would have cost us over $50,000 to put those young people in prison, and for how many years? We have to count the number of years. If those young people are not rehabilitated, they may well, in fact, get out of prison and go back in, in other words, spend their lives going through that revolving door, and that amounts to much more than $50,000.
It is extremely important to invest in rehabilitating those young people. The member spoke about this, and I would like to direct my question for him to what he said. What kind of society do we want to live in? Do we not see a dichotomy here? Once again, visions of the justice system in Quebec and Canada are extremely different, so different that our society, our society as Quebeckers, is being placed at risk.