Yes, Madam Speaker, there would certainly be a revolution in the ranks. They would be trying to root out those pinkos for sure who would even suggest that something like that could ever happen in a Conservative government, and yet it has all come to pass.
There is always room for some reform, some change of thought. We are in a minority government and there is a possibility that the government can be trained. The member from Thunder Bay mentioned that governments need training, especially minority governments, so maybe we could do some work on this one and try to get it to redirect some of its crime initiatives into a more reasonable and more workable form. The Conservatives are certainly unable to do it on their own.
The cost of the system is simply a function of having huge amounts of people incarcerated. The annual cost for persons in provincial or territorial custody, including remand and other temporary detention, in 2005 was $52,000. I have read other figures up as high as $70,000.
The average annual cost of supervising an offender in the community, including conditional sentences, probation, bail supervision, fine options and conditional release in 2006-07 was only $2,398. Juxtapose that figure against $52,000 to $70,000 for incarcerating these people in what are nothing more than crime schools. They are just trained to be better criminals.
Why would we try to eliminate a system that actually works, that saves on cost, that gets results?
I want to deal with recidivism rates and not knowing how much time I have left I will have to deal with that rather quickly.
A 2004 study found that conditional sentencing has had a significant impact on the rates of admission to custody, which have declined by 13% since its introduction. This represents a reduction of approximately 55,000 offenders who would otherwise be in custody.
Another Statistics Canada study found that adult offenders who spent their sentence under supervision in the community were far less likely to become reinvolved with correctional authorities within 12 months. Is that not what we want to happen to the released and those who were in a correctional institution? This is a win-win situation.
The study found that in four provinces, 11% of people who were under community supervision became reinvolved with correctional authorities within 12 months of their release in 2003-04. Among those in custody, only 30% were reinvolved. In other words, people who were put in jail were twice as much, 30%, double the proportion of those who were under community service, likely to reoffend. If that is not proof that the system is cost effective and actually gets results with only half the people reoffending, I would say is an argument for keeping it.
In a study that concentrated on victims of crime and their attitude toward conditional sentencing, the benefits of conditional sentencing were said to be:
--that most rehabilitation programs can be more effectively implemented when the offender is in the community rather than custody...that prison is no more effective a general or specific deterrent than the more severe intermediate punishments...keeping an offender in custody is significantly more expensive than supervising him or her in the community...the public has become more supportive of community-based sentencing, except when applied to serious crimes of violence...widespread interest in restorative justice...has also revitalized interest in community-based sanctions. Restorative justice promotes the use of victim compensation, and service to the community...The virtues of community sanctions have thus become increasingly apparent in recent years. When offenders are punished in the community, the state saves valuable correctional resources, the offender is able to continue (or seek) employment, and maintain ties with his or her family.
It is very important to not lose contact with family and with any employment possibilities. We have to get people back to a better place than they were when we found them.