Justice committee  Well, I think the issue is whether you want to do something that's effective or whether you want to do something that might, for a moment, look good. It seems to me that the evidence is overwhelming that what you're going to be doing if you pass this bill is telling the public that something effective is being done when the evidence is clear that we're working in the other direction.

Justice committee  On the issue of proportionality, the difficulty that was written into the Criminal Code in 1996 is the statement about proportionality, which I am obviously completely comfortable with. There is also a statement about the goals of sentencing that goes immediately before it. The difficulty is that accomplishing the various goals of sentencing may well conflict with proportionality.

Justice committee  What I would like to see is a debate about how we should use limited resources to deal with crime. The problem with firearms is not a problem we're having only in Canada. It's a problem that's occurring in other places. What we really need to do about firearms—and obviously I'm not saying anything very important—is to stop people from having them and stop people from carrying them.

Justice committee  In terms of the deterrent issue, he focused largely on Steven Levitt's work. Steven Levitt is, as I said, in large part because of the book Freakonomics, a very well-known person. There are very serious concerns above and beyond this particular study that Professors Webster and Zimring and I did.

Justice committee  I think what's clear is that it's independent of the change in the law that occurred in June of 1982. What we see toward the end of the 1980s in California is actually what you see across the United States during that period of time, which was that from the mid to late 1980s up until the early 1990s, there was an increase, and you're seeing that in California.

Justice committee  I did receive a copy of a PowerPoint presentation. I don't know whether it was presented to the committee or not.

Justice committee  If I could start, I'd like to respond to each of those. Obviously, I see a role for the criminal justice system when somebody has done a serious crime. I have no difficulty. It seems to me that we have to realize that the overall criminal justice system is a very important institution.

Justice committee  My starting point would be to say that if we're willing to do mandatory minimums, that means we have money on the table to deal with crime. Let's talk about that money. It seems to me that if we're talking about an extra 1,000 prisoners in this country, we're talking about $80 million.

Justice committee  In addition, I think there are two separate issues. One is programming and one is being in prison. There certainly are some studies that would suggest the programming outside of prison is likely to be more effective, part of it being that what we're talking about in Canada is we have relatively few....

Justice committee  Thank you very much. To understand whether increased penalties affect crime, I would suggest that you have to look at the overall weight of evidence. The conclusion that Professor Webster and I came to, based on a thorough survey of the evidence, especially that which was carried out in the last fifteen years, was that variation in the severity of sentences does not affect crime rates.

Justice committee  The reality is that from this point onwards, all of the figures are in my formal brief, which was given to you and I believe has been translated. So if anyone would like to look at these figures, the only difference of any substance is that I will be talking about figures 1 and 2 afterwards.

Justice committee  No. But the reality is that the document you have is simply the slides that you have before you.

Justice committee  Thank you very much. I'm a professor at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Toronto. My research on various topics in criminology has been published in a number of peer review journals during the last 35 years. Recently, a colleague at the University of Ottawa, Professor Cheryl Webster, and I wrote a detailed review of the research literature on deterrent impact of sentencing for Crime and Justice: A Review of the Research, which is one of the major publication series in this field.