Statement made on 07 July 2010 by Senator Tommy Banks (retired)
Hon. Tommy Banks:
Honourable senators, on June 22, the Parliamentary Budget Officer issued a report on the financial implications of the Truth in Sentencing Act. The report indicates that the application of this act will cost billions of dollars more than originally estimated.
The initial estimate by the Department of Justice was $90 million for this endeavour, but later that number was inflated to $2 billion over five years. The watchdogs now say this act and its application will cost between $10 billion and $13 billion over five years, with the provinces and territories on the hook for an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion over that same period. That is a lot of money.
I presume — and I think we all presumed — that the object of the Truth in Sentencing Act had at least something to do with reducing crime.
Honourable senators, can the government produce any evidence of any kind from any source in any country in the world which shows that higher levels of incarceration or minimum sentences or harsher sentences have any demonstrable positive effect on reducing crime rates?
I ask the question because of the report of the Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs. That committee spent 18 months looking at this question, among others, and heard from experts from around the world on penology, incarceration, crime psychology and the like. They were all emphatic, as one can see in this report, in making the point that longer and harsher prison sentences have exactly the opposite effect; that statistics prove irrefutably that longer and harsher prison sentences lead, in fact, to substantially increased percentages of recidivism.
Honourable senators, in light of the fact that the Americans went down this road 25 years ago, and have discovered that it is wrong and are now retreating from it, why are we going down that same road now and spending all this money when we know it will have the opposite effect to what was intended?
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