Justice committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to speak to the committee about conditional sentencing in Canada. After briefly presenting some data to set the context, we will look at conditional sentencing from two vantage points: the courts and corrections. Our analysis was rest

Justice committee  The data upon which this analysis is based are publicly available, but we have put the data together for today's presentation in a particular way.

Justice committee  I am making this particular presentation for the first time today. I can't speak to the different types of analyses that have been conducted elsewhere.

Justice committee  What we can speak to with our data set are those factors we've presented here today, the three mitigating factors we have been able to look at to date. That's what our data set includes.

Justice committee  I'll refer you to the chart 13 that we prepared in the presentation. This particular chart provides information on the length of supervision time that was attached to conditional sentences. Within the chart you can see a breakdown. You can see the average number of days attache

Justice committee  I'm going to refer you to slide seven, because the second way we can look at the offence type is to say, of a particular type of offence, what proportion--

Justice committee  Yes, we're talking about slide seven. What this chart shows is, for drug-trafficking offences, in what proportion of those offences in 2003-04 a conditional sentence was imposed upon conviction. One-third of the drug-trafficking offences in 2003-04, upon conviction, were awarde

Justice committee  We have two slides that I'll refer you to, and we can look at conditional sentencing in two different ways. Slide eight takes the conditional sentence population for 2003-04 and looks at its composition vis-à-vis an offence type. So of all the conditional sentences, over 13,000

Justice committee  The other sexual offences category includes such offences as sexual interference, sexual exploitation, invitation to sexual touching, and similar types of offences. That's what that includes as a group.

Justice committee  What we're saying is that 32% of sexual assault offences, upon conviction, resulted in conditional sentences. Sorry, other sexual offences--yes, you're right.

Justice committee  We can't provide a definitive answer to that question. There are many assumptions one would have to make around how the proceedings would take place. We can't provide a definitive answer to that.

Justice committee  Let me try to be clearer on this. If we look at other sexual offences as an offence type and we ask what proportion of other sexual offences would have been awarded a conditional sentence upon conviction, that was 32%. The total number of cases that were awarded a conditional se

Justice committee  I'll ask my colleague. Craig, do we have information available on that?

Justice committee  What I can do is refer you to a few things you'll find in your presentation package. If you look at chart 12, the heading on chart 12--I'm making the asumption that they're not all numbered there--almost one-third of conditional sentences imposed for a Bill C-9 listed offence..

Justice committee  I certainly can't speak to the eventual impact of the bill, but what I can speak to is the data that you see in the final slide. These data for the four jurisdictions that are presented here do speak to re-involvement after a sentence has been served, but in doing the analysis, w