Public Safety committee  Largely, it's around release planning. It's integration and engagement with the community support that exists for these men and women within their own cultural communities.

Public Safety committee  I can't give you a specific cost dollar. I can tell you that the average cost of incarcerating a man in a federal penitentiary is about $108,00 or $110,000 a year. It's about twice that for a typical woman. I can tell you that for Ashley Smith's year in custody, it cost about f

Public Safety committee  Whenever you answer a question starting with the words “With all due respect”, you run the risk of the answer not being taken in the spirit in which it's being offered, so I'll avoid saying that. However, I think there's tremendous value in parliamentarians becoming intimately

Public Safety committee  Madam Kingsley will give you a good answer to that question. I'll just say something first. Some inmates will choose not to engage in the correctional plan for a variety of reasons. They are rare, so we should never be misled by the suggestion that it's recalcitrant inmate offen

Public Safety committee  Right, and I know that's not what you were saying. I acknowledge that, but we do hear it, the idea that the inmates don't want the programs. That happens occasionally, but it's rare. For the more thoughtful and appropriate answer, I'll ask Marie-France.

Public Safety committee  Yes, the diversion of prescribed medication is an issue. Again, it's an issue that the Correctional Service of Canada is well aware of, and they have increased efforts in terms of surveillance, monitoring, and substituting one form of drug for another. That includes, for example

Public Safety committee  In terms of the nuts and bolts, let me share with you some of the things the Correctional Service of Canada has already identified, including adding mental health professionals as permanent members of institutional segregation review boards and having offenders with mental health

Public Safety committee  As I say, it's a very slow, incremental, frustrating pace of change.

Public Safety committee  There's a certain urgency. When we looked at those 30 prison suicides over three years, we found that 14 people had died in segregation cells in those three years, so yes, there's a certain urgency.

Public Safety committee  I think it is a very hard truth that, unfortunately, criminal conduct and corruption exist. Thank goodness it's not a huge part of the puzzle, but it's part of it. As I said earlier, I'm not familiar with a drug-free prison anywhere. I'm not sure we'd want to operate such a thin

Public Safety committee  Oh no, and I agree, but I don't think we were discussing safe or supervised injection sites. I think we were talking about a prison-based needle exchange, which are really two very different things. The reality is that you want to deal with people's addictions as health issues,

Public Safety committee  There are some areas in the country where we're having more gang involvement and more gang issues than ever before. A lot of this, though, has to do with having the right mix of cell types, capacities, and security levels, etc., and good staff training, but segregation in and of

Public Safety committee  Again, I know we're pressed for time, so I'll give you one little sliver of an answer. When somebody appears before a sentencing judge and that judge says, “I'm going to send you to the penitentiary so you can get a program”, the judge is making an assumption that such a program

Public Safety committee  Thank you. This is a role reversal you've just done on me, because that's the question I ask Correctional Service of Canada. I assume that we're still talking about segregation—

Public Safety committee  In 2008 when we did our first report on Ashley Smith's death, we made specific recommendations about segregation, and a lot of it had to do with training and adhering to the framework. Things went really wrong with Ashley Smith. For example, the segregation review she was entitle