Table 7
Cases in select provincial and superior courts by mean and median length of prison sentence, 2006/2007

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Offence category

Total

Total

Provincial court

Provincial court

Superior court

Superior court

Mean

Median

Mean

Median

Mean

Median

number

percent

days

number

percent

days

number

percent

days

Total cases with prison 1

29,687

100.0

121

30

29,344

100.0

111

30

343

100.0

989

550

Crimes against the person

4,583

15.4

309

84

4,418

15.1

264

63

165

48.1

1,504

1,095

Crimes against property

10,090

34.0

103

34

10,043

34.2

102

33

47

13.7

352

180

Administration of justice

8,619

29.0

23

12

8,612

29.3

23

12

7

2.0

207

30

Other Criminal Code

2,172

7.3

95

30

2,139

7.3

87

30

33

9.6

573

360

Criminal Code traffic

2,127

7.2

105

30

2,110

7.2

101

30

17

5.0

523

450

Other federal statutes

2,096

7.1

244

75

2,022

6.9

230

66

74

21.6

611

270

1.Seven provinces and territories (i.e., Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon and Northwest Territories).

Note: The median represents the mid-point of a group of values when all the values are sorted by size. Excludes cases where length of prison was not known, and cases where the length was specified as indeterminant. Cases sentenced to life imprisonment were recorded to 9,125 days (or 25 years) for the calculation of the average (mean) and median sentence lengths. Superior court data are not available for Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Nunavut has a single level trial court. Prince Edward Island superior court data do not include information on the number of appearances and elapsed time from first to last case appearance. As a result, data for Prince Edward Island have been removed from the analysis.
Source: Statistics Canada, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Uniform Crime Reporting Survey.