Are Average Federal Sentences Getting Shorter?
This brings us to the next question: Whether average federal sentences at admission are getting shorter? To answer this question, historical information on new federal court commitments has been extracted from the Correctional Service of Canada’s Offender Management System (OMS) covering the period since 1994. To somewhat simplify the amount of data that needed to be processed for this report, we have identified 8 of the most common and serious federal offences (listed below in Table 8): The eight most common federal offences collectively account for about 70% of all new court committals to federal custody each year. The most serious sentence on the federal term was identified, and the mean length of sentence of every group computed for each year. (A separate series was compiled for offenders sentenced for murder, and these cases are examined in the next section.
