Mr. Speaker, millions of people in the U.S. have been in jail. There has been a dramatic increase, but the streets are not safer.
If we are looking for a model, it is right in front us, in Quebec. I have seen the way the Quebec court system works. It gives young people a second chance. It does not just talk about principles. It actually invests in young people. It has programs. It believes in young people, that because they are young, they are still learning and there is a chance for them to turn their lives around.
The majority of young people can do that. Yes, there is a very small percentage of hardened criminals, but I am not talking about them. I am talking about the majority of young people.
If we look at the rate in Quebec of those who reoffend, the ones who have gone to jail or who have committed crimes and received alternative sentences, very few of them reoffend. The percentage of young people who reoffend is actually much lower than the percentage outside Quebec. Why? It is because Quebec fundamentally believes that young people have the capacity to reform themselves.
When we talk about principles and sentencing, we have to be very clear. The first principle is that we have to believe young people have the capacity to change. If not, then we throw the key away. They are young people. For how many years are we going to put them in jail? It is not going to work. We have to find the best solutions. In Quebec quite a lot of programs work very well, and of course, there are other models outside Quebec.
On the principle of simply locking them up and putting more and more people in jail, we have seen the example in the U.S. and it has not worked.