Mr. Speaker, this is a debate about what prisons are and what the philosophy should be. The member rightly pointed out a number of areas. I would also like to refer to some statistics that my hon. colleague from Vancouver pointed out to us today.
The fact is it costs roughly $150,000 to keep a person in prison and roughly $185,000 to keep a female in prison today. The cost of parole, including halfway houses, is around $39,000.
In the past five years around 7,000 offenders were entitled to consideration for accelerated parole and roughly 4,800 were granted it. It had an 84% success rate. Those are not bad statistics. It means these people came out of jail and did not go back to crime.
Is this not what it is all about? Should our crime policy not only allow for punishment, but also ensure that it does not happen again?
Could he comment on that?