Mr. Speaker, I do not know about the gems, but I want to thank my colleague from Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine and also congratulate her as our justice critic for working very hard on this file and for listening to people like me who are experiencing a lot of gun related crime in their ridings.
She makes a very good point. If we look at the incarceration rates in the United States, where incarceration is at a much higher level than it is in a country such as Canada, we would think that would have an impact on violent crimes, for example. Exactly the reverse is true. The United States has the highest incidence of violent and gun-related crimes and the highest levels of incarceration rates.
Someone might argue that of course if there is more crime there is going to be more incarceration, but some experts have actually done some analysis. They have concluded, by looking at the data and trying to pull out various variables that are controlled, that in fact crime rates alone do not account for incarceration rates in the United States.
In other words, there are more people in the United States and there is a higher crime rate in the United States, but these levels do not explain the incarceration rates. If we control for crime categories that are defined, the U.S. still locks up more people than any other nation per incidence, the exception being robbery in Russia, so we need to understand that putting people--