Public Safety Committee on May 29th, 2006

[Don Head]

A good portion of the people you see at 340 Laurier are national headquarters staff. The public safety department is also located at 340 Laurier--the secretariat, as we commonly refer to it--and they have responsibility for things such as helping to shape correctional policy. Where Correctional Service Canada is responsible for implementing the policy and the legislative frame, the secretariat is involved in setting up policy. We play a contributing role in that. It has roles around aboriginal policing and other things that are within the public safety domain.

[Renée Collette]

We have a national office, but our main activities are all in the regions. We are divided into five regions, the same as my colleague talked about. We have one office in each region, and the prairie region has two offices, one in Saskatoon and one in Edmonton. Our board members, part-time and full-time, except for six of us, are all in the regions, not in the national office.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Okay. We'll have to explore that later. We only have 25 minutes left here.

Mr. Cotler.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank the witnesses for their presentations.

Mr. Head, you mentioned the aboriginal prison population. I think the figure you gave was 18%. Can you break that down in terms of gender? My understanding--unless I'm incorrect--is that aboriginal men make up 17% of the male population, and aboriginal women make up 31% of the female population. Is that correct?

[Don Head]

Yes, those are very close numbers, sir.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Would it also be correct to say that the aboriginal women population at 31% is up from 29% in 2004, and from approximately 24% a decade ago?

[Don Head]

Yes. For the most part there has been a slight decline in the federal population, and more recently it is just starting to level out. But in terms of sub-populations, the overall aboriginal population is growing, and the admission of women into the federal system has started to increase.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Madam Louise Arbour, now the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, did a study on the prison system when she was a commissioner. In a recent interview, some ten years after the inquiry, she said that reforms to the prison system have fallen substantially short of her expectations. She cited three critiques, and I'd like you to respond to them.

One was the growing number of aboriginal women behind bars, to which I referred, which she referenced as being “a disturbing element of a prison system that has failed to act imaginatively or to address fundamental discrimination”.

The second point she mentioned was that “aboriginal offenders are more likely than others to be lodged in maximum-security prisons”.

Third, she is quoted as expressing “disappointment that instead of experimenting with innovative programs for female inmates, Correctional Service Canada programming and treatment remain dominated by male concerns and a male perspective”.

Do you have any response to these critiques?

[Don Head]

Sure, sir, a couple of things.

It is interesting that we as a service have not had a chance to directly interact with Louise Arbour about her comments. Our understanding is that they came after the release of the ten-year report and some interactions she had with some other individuals.

In terms of, for example, the comment about growing discrimination around aboriginal women, a lot of work has been going on in our women offenders sector. We have in this sector a deputy commissioner for women, led by Anne Kelly, whose sole purpose since Madam Justice Arbour's report was to reshape how correctional services are delivered for women within Canada.

Some of the significant changes include the establishment of regional women's facilities across the country, no longer just the Prison for Women that was located in Kingston Penitentiary. It's closed now. We have modern regional women's facilities across the country, which allows women to be closer to their home communities.

There has been a lot of work done in the last couple of years in developing specific women-oriented programs. The staff that work in these facilities not only go through the same training as any other correctional officer, but are also subjected to a women-centred orientation training in order to function in those facilities.

There has been a lot of work going on in terms of the programming, women-specific programming for substance abuse, issues of family violence, programs that are very specific to women, programs that are being looked at by other jurisdictions, not only within Canada but around the world, as models for use in delivering their programs for women.

Aboriginal offenders in general being classified higher or at maximum security is an issue and is a concern for us. Some of the tools we use, we know we need to look at differently in terms of whether there's a built-in bias in those tools and to see what movements or gains need to be made in changing the tools to reflect the needs of aboriginal people. But at the same time we know that if we were to scrap the existing tools and go back to basically a purely subjective assessment model done by individual staff, we actually run the risk of having even more individuals being classified higher than the ones who are being classified today.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you very much.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Do I have time for a short question, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Well, you're one minute over already. Maybe we can come back.

Mr. Carrier.

[Robert Carrier, Bloc, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

What strikes me the most about the Correctional Service is your mission to contribute to public safety by actively encouraging and helping offenders to become law-abiding citizens. That is a noble, worthwhile objective.

Earlier, you stated that there has been an increased in the number of inmates serving three or four year sentences for whom no treatment or programs have been planned. That worries me a little. Do you feel that these offenders have been forgotten and will not get any consideration unless they commit more serious offences?

[Don Head]

It's a major concern for us at this moment. We are looking at what steps we can take in terms of accelerating the assessment process for individuals who received a two- to three-year sentence. Given that many of them come in with a substance abuse problem, we're also looking at whether we can initiate their involvement in a substance abuse program when they're in the assessment units, as opposed to waiting until they get moved to their initial full-placement institution.

Currently a normal process would see about 70 to 90 days of assessment for an individual coming into the system. Then on average across the country—it varies, depending on what part of the country you're in—about 229 days will elapse before an individual is actually enrolled in their first program. So 229 days, plus the 70 days for a two-year sentence, and we are almost at the point of consideration for statutory release, yet the individual hasn't received any programming. So we're currently looking at how we modify the assessment process and the initiation of the first program for offenders, specifically those in that two- to three-year range.

[Robert Carrier, Bloc, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you.

You also stated that approximately 500 inmates in various institutions are in need of psychiatric care. Do they in fact receive specialized care in these institutions? Wouldn't it be better to house all of these inmates in one facility where they could receive better specialized care?

[Don Head]

In this area, we're pursuing both an institutional and a community-based strategy. We received money last year to put in place a stronger support mechanism and service delivery component for individuals who are going out into the community with mental health issues. I think we're in a very good position to make some gains there.

Before, individuals with mental health problems who were being released into the community were basically left to tap into existing community resources, which, as everybody knows, are overtaxed right now. So we received moneys to put in place a more comprehensive approach to deal with these individuals.

Currently within the Correctional Service of Canada, we're revising our institutional mental health strategy. We're looking at how we currently use our regional treatment and psychiatric centres, at what the best programming delivered in those facilities should be, and at which categories of offenders with mental health issues are the best ones to go to those very specific facilities with more targeted psychological and psychiatric types of services.

At the same time, we're looking at what kinds of support services—such as ambulatory care support—should go into the mainstream institutions to support those individuals, because the number of beds we have in our specialized treatment centres don't match the number of individuals with mental health problems.

Regardless of what we do on the institutional strategy side, we will always have individuals with some form of mental health problem sitting in the mainstream institutions. So we need to have some capacity there to address their needs, until they can either access the specialized program interventions in those facilities or are released and able to tap into the community interventions that are being put in place.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you, Mr. Head.

Mr. Brown, did you have some questions?

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'd like to thank our witnesses for coming today.

A couple of months ago, I had—I won't say the pleasure—the opportunity to go into Kingston Penitentiary. There's a group there that works towards better preparing prisoners for release. This is a question that pertains both to statutory release and to those out on parole: Is there any way we can see more resources going into preparing people for release?

We've heard from other members here about drug problems and other issues that make it more difficult for prisoners to reintegrate into society. I've heard stories about some who don't have basic life skills and don't even know how to apply for a social insurance number or other identification. They don't know where to begin. Maybe sometimes we expect that these people have these skills. Are there any resources going into helping prepare these people for release?

[Don Head]

Chair, I'll start.

One of the things we've been doing specifically with individuals who are being released on statutory release is to try, for lack of a better word, to envelop them with the kinds of supports they need to make the transition in going from the institution.

Kingston Penitentiary, similar to the case in earlier comments related to the Edmonton institution, is a maximum security facility, and for the individuals who are leaving there it's a day-and-night kind of situation, going from a very tight security facility to the street. We've been looking at how to best facilitate that transition to the community, for simple things such as you have mentioned, such as when getting a social insurance number to help them fill out the forms ahead of time. Sometimes through our citizens' advisory committees, sometimes through the volunteers who come into the institutions, we help individuals with those processes.

But we've also looked at even the way we go about releasing individuals on the day of their release. At certain times individuals may be released on a Friday, which makes absolutely no sense, because now they're going from this completely tight security environment out onto the street. There are no social service support networks available over the weekend, and we run a very high risk of something happening. So we have been using provisions under the legislation to release a person a day earlier, so that the contacts with social services or support networks are made before they're facing a weekend, or a long weekend, whatever the case may be.

As I mentioned earlier, we have basically stretched the limits of our resources to do work there, or they continue to be stretched, because we're having to spend a lot more time dealing with the statutory release cases and are drawing on volunteers and citizen advisory committees to play a role in assisting with this issue.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Okay. That's what I wanted to hear, that you were going to use those citizen advisory committees a little more.

Madame Collette...?

[Renée Collette]

As I think you know, we don't make decisions about statutory release; that's by statute and by law. The only thing we do is, if the Correctional Services of Canada recommends some conditions, decide whether these conditions are necessary and reasonable in having a gradual reinsertion and reintegration of these people.

I would say the sooner the better. I don't know whether it's a good expression, but as Mr. Head mentioned, the sooner the person is assessed and can be involved in a program and have the kind of support you're talking about, the sooner we can make our decision as well, even prior to statutory release, and then take it from there.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

I have one final question, and maybe there's a minute or two left for my colleague, Mr. Norlock. Or maybe not....

When you did the assessment of the impact of Bill C-10.... It assumed there could be 200 or 400 additional prisoners in the system at any given time. Is that...? My assessment is correct there.

Was there any provision for the deterrence factor--that possibly it might deter people from committing those crimes? I know the former minister might not agree with me on this one, but was there any provision in the assessment for that?

[Don Head]

Within Correctional Service Canada, we'd have no capacity to measure that. We would just look at the pure inflow-outflow impact of the bill.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Ms. Kadis.