Mr. Speaker, nobody is minimizing the consequences of any action. Every person in a federal penitentiary committed a crime that created damage. That is a given. The Conservatives and the Bloc keep repeating that. Obviously everybody in a federal prison has done something wrong. The question is this. As an intelligent society, what is the best way to deal with those people?
This is what the Association des avocats et avocates en droit carcéral du Québec said:
“The accelerated parole review regime removes a significant number of relatively non-criminalized often young individuals from a destructive environment, if the board certifies that they are appropriate cases...it removes them as early as possible, ideally before they fall in with even worse company...The accelerated parole review is not a gift to people. What it does is it extends the period of supervision of these appropriate candidates, supervision in the community. Supervision in the community is not a failure of the system. It's social reintegration in a structured managed way. It's in the interest of public security. It gives us hope that these individuals will not be committing new crimes and creating new victims in the future. That has always been the purpose of supervised release and here we're backing away from it. It makes no sense”.
I would like to correct something my hon. friend said. He said “getting out”. They do not get out. They are still serving their sentence, just in a different environment.
I wonder how many people have been in a halfway house in our country. I have and they are places of incarceration. They are drab places, where there is supervision, conditions and curfews. That is where people serve their sentence. It is still a structured place of incarceration and they still serve their sentence for the entire period. They get out at one-third or two-thirds to be reintegrated into society.