Public Safety committee  It's a very broad question, and I would hesitate to answer it. I suspect that there are many other people in Canada much better able to answer that than I. I would simply repeat some of what I said earlier. We know that the more you can reconnect people with healthy structures,

Public Safety committee  Whether you attend, whether you contribute, whether you learn and pick up stuff in the program itself are the sorts of things the people running the programs will be measuring. Much of that is the kind of acquisition of knowledge and information, becoming more educated and having

Public Safety committee  No, I don't think it brings religion or spirituality into government programs. I think it's being culturally specific in one's delivery of care. I've seen faith-based units in New Zealand--Christian faith-based ones--that have received encouraging data. There's not a lot of outco

Public Safety committee  Thank you for that. I think the things that we ask prison officers to do are complex and difficult. We often underestimate the magnitude of their task, especially when we're trying to tell them to be rehabilitative as well when they're in situations where there are people who h

Public Safety committee  Not of itself more difficult.... It will be larger because there will be more people. We don't have any good evidence in New Zealand or internationally as to whether in those countries with rising rates of incarceration the people coming into prison have more mental health or a

Public Safety committee  The evidence is pretty clear that ACT delivers best mental health outcomes and substance misuse problems when, as we were talking earlier, the two are combined. Unfortunately, ACT teams have been disappointing, in terms of reducing re-arrest or re-incarceration of people with ser

Public Safety committee  Generally, those acute medical problems will be more common within the provincial remand centres. There may be a little of that, of people at first point of sentence who've been on bail in the community entering federal corrections directly, but that will be a relatively small nu

Public Safety committee  It is a hypothetical that one couldn't give a hard number to. I would say the 7.5% figure given earlier is impressive. If we think of 80% of people having the problem, and fewer than 10% of them actually manifesting it within prison, well, that's progress. To get to zero, you w

Public Safety committee  I would say similarly, from the work I have done since I have been here in contact with federal and provincial corrections and from the things I have read—both your report from late last year, as well as Howard Sapers' report after the Ashley Smith death—and the contact I've had

Public Safety committee  Most of the correctional literature concerns males, obviously, as 90% of inmates are male. The concurrent work, as Wayne was saying earlier, shows that getting your mental health and addictions treatment from the same team works better than farming it out among different provider

Public Safety committee  If you're talking about acute biological withdrawal, often that will manifest in the police lock-up over the first couple of days after arrest and in the provincial receiving remand prisons, rather than at the federal level. From what I've seen through the contact I've had with t

Public Safety committee  Serious addiction. We're talking about more than simple use. The 80% involves...some people have abuse problems, rather than true addiction. The core addicts might be much more like what, 30% or so, Wayne?

Public Safety committee  Yes to all of the things that you listed, I think. For some people, if you have a risk of developing a mental illness and you also use drugs and alcohol, your risk of manifesting that mental illness goes up. Once you then have the mental illness, the risk of it being worse in t

Public Safety committee  The prevalence of serious mental illness in prison is much lower than that. Psychotic illness runs in a varying rate between about 5% and 8% of the standing prison population; bipolar disorder, around 2% to 3% of the prison population; and current major depression, maybe 15% to 2

Public Safety committee  There is much that is similar. There are significant things that are different, but much that is similar in terms of the nature of the problems, and I think those are problems with offenders, drugs in prisons internationally. We have similar prevalence rates for drug misuse in Ne