Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, Dr. Looman.
Dr. Looman, I was actually perusing the papers just a couple of days ago, and I came across an article in The Globe and Mail. The headline was “Canada's prisons becoming warehouses for the mentally ill”. I want to mention a couple of things that were quoted by the Canadian Psychiatric Association. Basically, what they were saying is that prisons are becoming the institute of last resort for the mentally ill.
Also, the article talked about the CSC not being geared towards handling the vast population of the mentally ill who are in our prison systems. I would have to agree with Mr. Norlock when he pointed out—and this was also quoted in the paper by this psychiatric association spokesperson—that we live in a first-world country, yet the conditions in which the mentally ill are treated in the prison system are appalling.
Can you maybe talk about the relationship between mental illness and substance abuse, and how inadequate treatments are for the mentally ill housed in our prisons, and how it affects the severity of problems of drugs and alcohol in prisons?