Bill C-12 (Historical)

Drug-Free Prisons Act

An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act

This enactment amends the Corrections and Conditional Release Act to require the Parole Board of Canada (or a provincial parole board, if applicable) to cancel parole granted to an offender if, before the offender’s release, the offender tests positive in a urinalysis, or fails or refuses to provide a urine sample, and the Board considers that the criteria for granting parole are no longer met. It also amends that Act to clarify that any conditions set by a releasing authority on an offender’s parole, statutory release or unescorted temporary absence may include conditions regarding the offender’s use of drugs or alcohol, including in cases when that use has been identified as a risk factor in the offender’s criminal behaviour.

Drug-Free Prisons Act

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Surrey North for his excellent speech and for sharing his experience in his riding and the experience he had when he visited a penitentiary.

He touched on this, but I would like him to elaborate on the subject: does he think this is a real missed opportunity on the part of the Conservatives, to have a bill with this title but with only four clauses that ultimately only reiterate a practice that already exists at the Parole Board? Is this an opportunity that the Conservatives have missed to put new measures in place, real, concrete measures, to prevent the spread of drugs in our prisons? They could have done so much more.

With a title like this, it truly is a missed opportunity. As other colleagues have said, the bill will not have the planned effects, as stated in its title. Is this a missed opportunity? And with this being budget day, would there be other opportunities that the government might offer in order to genuinely address this very real and well documented problem?

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the short title of the bill is very misleading in the sense that we all aspire to have drug-free prisons, but there is nothing in the bill that is going to help us have drug-free prisons. The bill allows the Parole Board to use drug tests on prisoners to deny them parole. That is already happening. That practice is being used by the Parole Board.

This is a missed opportunity. The member is absolutely right. Today is budget day. The government has run out of new ideas for some concrete ways to make prisons a safer place for correctional workers and for the reintegration of individuals into society. Instead, the Conservatives have come up with a fancy name for a bill that has no impact whatsoever on the actual workings of the prisons or any sort of elimination of drugs.

The official opposition has always advocated for ways to reduce harm and reduce drug use in prisons. We will continue to do that. In 2015, we will bring in real concrete action, real concrete proposals to ensure that our prisons are safe not only for the workers, but also for the prisoners.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague. There are so many people working on making safer streets, dealing with recidivism, making sure that we actually get people out of the drug trade and making sure that people do not get involved in drugs. Then we have the Conservative government.

This is a perfect Conservative bill. It meets the three criteria: one, it has a ridiculous title that means nothing; two, it will not change anything because what it is claiming to do is already within the Parole Board; and three, the big kicker, the Conservatives have already wasted $122 million and have not changed anything. They are going to stand again and bang their heads against a brick wall that they created in their prison attitudes without ever bringing forward in the House one coherent, reasonable response that would actually cut down the drug trade and bring down the rates of recidivism.

With the member's experience in Surrey and what he knows in dealing with drug issues through his portfolio in the House, why does my colleague think the government continues to present such tired, out-of-touch ideas? Maybe it is time that Canadians finally did throw those guys out.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I could not have summed it up better than the member for Timmins—James Bay did. This bill has a fancy title and yet it has no meat. It pretends to do something that it will not really do. That is what has been happening with the Conservative government over the last four years that I have been here. The government pretends to be doing something, but actually does not do anything.

The member is absolutely right. The government spent $122 million over a three-year period to eradicate drugs from prisons. What was the result? The result was zero change. In the Correctional Service annual reports, I checked the random drug testing that was done and after this $122 million was spent, the rate of drugs in prisons was the same as before. There was no significant change.

Experts have been telling the government that if it is looking at the supply side, it also has to look at the demand side, which involves prevention and rehabilitation. The government put a chunk of money on the supply side, which had no effect on the amount of drugs getting into prisons, but on the demand side, it cut the preventive and rehabilitation programs that would cut the supply if there was no demand. I know it is hard for the Conservatives to comprehend something as simple as supply and demand.

The member is absolutely right. The government has run out of ideas. I think Canadians will show the Conservatives the door come October 19, 2015.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, crime is a big issue for many Canadians, I would say in particular in his part of Canada, in Surrey. It is a top-of-mind issue for many voters and yet in dealing with this issue, it is important to bring our best intelligence and thoughtfulness around what to do about crime, be it crime that is committed in prisons or leading in.

My question for the member is about this particularly annoying statistic for the Conservatives, which should not be annoying because it is good news. For a number of years now, 15 or 20 years or more, crime rates in Canada have been steadily dropping. Violent crimes, property crimes, murder and whatnot have steadily dropped, all statistics across the board. At the same time, since the Conservatives have been in government, and I would argue it was more for political reasons that they needed to make crime an issue, the incarceration rate has gone up. Before any of the measures that the Conservatives brought in, the crime rate was dropping and continues to drop even though they bring in these new laws and they are supposed to change this, that, and the other. The one thing that has changed is incarceration, which is an incredibly expensive thing. It runs up to more than $100,000 a year per prisoner. My friend tells me it is $150,000 for a federal maximum prison. However, the government is unconcerned with whether its measures are actually working, but just wants to spend money and lock up more people.

If crime is dropping, let us look at the things that actually work. If incarceration rates are going up, let us look at who is being incarcerated and try to find out how to prevent the crime in the first place. Would that not be the most ideal crime-fighting tactic any government could take on?

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley hit the nail on the head. Absolutely, we need to take proactive approaches to crime in today's society, and prevention is the best investment any government and any society could make.

There have been a number of shootings in the town of Surrey over the last month. There have been over 20 shootings. A young person was killed over the weekend. There are fears in my community that this will further escalate. Not only do we need more police, which the government promised back in 2006, but we also need additional preventive programs, preventive investment in communities, to ensure that young people are not getting into these types of activities. Unfortunately, I have talked to many organizations on the ground and the Conservatives have failed to make these vital investments in communities that would make them safe.

Many studies have been done. These are not Kijiji facts. These are academic studies from the United States and Canada where a minimal investment in crime prevention programs provides a huge return at the end. As the member pointed out, it costs a lot of money to keep someone in prison. Up to $150,000 is being spent per prisoner per year, but a fraction of that invested early on in gang-prevention programs in communities would make Canada a better place for all Canadians.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to play a role in this debate. It is an important debate.

Although the bill itself is rather modest in scope it is rather expansive in title. It claims to be the drug-free prisons act, but it would actually amend a practice that is currently being carried out by the Parole Board, which is to take into account either a failure to take a drug sample or the results of a drug sample testing for someone who is about to be released on parole. Therefore, it would not actually change very much, except to put into law a practice that already exists. However, it is an opportunity for New Democrats to spend some time to talk about the approach the government has taken not only for legislation in general, but in particular, legislation as it relates to crime and punishment and the treatment of offenders.

We can be magnanimous today and say everyone in the House would like to have a safer society. We would like to have safer streets and communities. The question is, how do we go about that and is the government's approach one that works and actually creates safer communities or is it not? We on this side of the House, in particular New Democrats, believe that the government is an absolute failure when it comes to this issue. It is great at the rhetoric. We have one here today. “The act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act” is the long title. The short title, the inaccurate propaganda title, is “the drug-free prisons act”. The government is good at propaganda. It actually puts propaganda into the names of legislation.

I do not know if this is unique to this particular government. Maybe the Liberals did it too. I do not remember that far back. I was not here then. I was here back in 1987 when the Progressive Conservatives were in power but I was not here during the Liberal regime.

To call this act “the drug-free prisons act” is an attempt to fool people. There is an old saying that is common enough, but we do not hear it that often these days as it is a bit of an old-fashioned saying. It is, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” In fact, one cannot fool the majority of the people all of the time and the government is going to find that out in September of this year.

Let me go back to the first part of that saying, “You can fool all of the people some of the time”. The government believes it can get away with titles like this. It believes it can fool all of the people some of the time. By calling a bill “the drug-free prisons act”, it believes it can make people think the bill will remove drugs from prisons.

The government has spent $122 million on interdiction programs over a three-year period from 2012 on, the same period it took $295 million out of the corrections system. What was the result? Did it create drug-free prisons? It absolutely did not. In fact, there are just as many drugs in prisons these days as there were then. Therefore, is the government's approach working? No, it is not.

I would like to quote from the office of the correctional investigator, Howard Sapers, a very renowned expert on this matter. He is so renowned that the government decided not to renew his appointment after serving the position for some eight years or more and doing a magnificent job providing dispassionate, fact-based, evidence-based advice to government. In his 2011-12 annual report he said that a zero tolerance stance to drugs in prison is an aspiration rather than an effective policy that:

...simply does not accord with the facts of crime and addiction in Canada or elsewhere in the world. Harm reduction measures within a public health and treatment orientation offer a far more promising, cost-effective and sustainable approach to reducing subsequent crime and victimization.

The John Howard Society is working very hard at this but this is basically saying that it is not a realistic goal to even have. Therefore, the government really has the question put wrongly and it has the wrong answer.

What we are really trying to do to create a safer society and safer communities is to reduce the number of victims of crime. We know that the crime rates are going down, although we would not know that from the emphasis that the government is placing on it. Prisons are becoming more filled. The conditions in prison are getting worse with double-bunking and so forth. One of the consequences of that is we will not have safer communities. If we have people in prison longer without programs to assist with issues such as drug addiction and substance abuse, many of those prisoners will eventually be released into society once they have served their sentence. If they go out into those communities without those problems having been solved or tackled they will pose a bigger danger to society and there will be more victims of crime. That is just plain logic. I know that interferes with the views of some of the members opposite with respect to humankind and how we should deal with criminals.

I practised law for many years and practised criminal law for a number of those years. I understand the system. There are principles of sentencing. The idea of sentencing is to fit the sentence to the crime. There are a number of factors taken into consideration. We need to deter and punish crime but we also need to rehabilitate the offenders so that we have safer communities. Those factors are taken into consideration. Once they get into a prison those factors should be put to work. Once they are removed from society, as best we can we want to reduce the rate of recidivism, which is a complicated word for a simple thing. It means that we do not want these people who are in prison to commit crimes when they get out. How do we do that? By spending $122 million over a period to try to interdict and prevent drugs from getting into prisons, totally without serious effect, and then spend I think it was $9 million to $11 million over the same period on substance abuse programs in our prisons. That does not make sense. At the point in time when this bill was going through committee it was estimated that 2,400 prisoners in our corrections system were waiting to get access to a substance abuse program. One would ask what happened. One aspect is that they are in prison with no access to a substance abuse program and have access to drugs, because we know that there are drugs in the system. When those prisoners eventually come out of prison without having had an opportunity to deal with their drug addiction and without having an opportunity to move forward they will go back into the streets without the ability or the opportunity to be better serving members of society. That is really what we are dealing with.

One of the comments that was made by representatives of the John Howard Society was that this bill will not eliminate drugs from prisons and merely seems to be a tactic to ignore some of the real issues in prison, such as mental illness, double-bunking and prisoner self-harm. Prisoner self-harm is one aspect that we are reminded of as a result of the very tragic story of Ashley Smith, a young woman who died in prison at the age of 19. She was first arrested at the age of 14 for I believe throwing crabapples at a letter carrier, which was what got her in trouble with the law. She ended up in what turned out to be a death spiral from the ages of 14 to 19, which led her to desperation and maltreatment by the prison system. There have been reports on this. It is a tragic case.

It was well investigated, well reported on, but tragic nonetheless. She ended up killing herself under the watchful eye of corrections officials who were told not to interfere while she was strangling herself in prison. That is what it came to in that particular case. It was a sense of desperation that cried out for reform, cried out for change, and change is still required to take place. We are not getting it from the government. What we are getting instead is increased crowding in prisons and the closing down of some special facilities that dealt with mental health cases in prisons.

We do know that when we are talking about drugs in prison, a very high percentage of the offender population who abuses drugs is also currently struggling with mental illness as well. We do not have adequate programs in the prisons for that.

The Conservative government is closing down treatment centres for inmates dealing with serious mental illness. This is a very serious problem. Many times drug abuse and substance abuse occur with mental health problems. There are some figures that show the size of this issue. In 2011, it was estimated that 45% of male offenders and 69% of female offenders had received a mental health care intervention prior to going into prison.

That shows a level of serious need within prisons to provide access to care and access to programs. Prison can, in fact, be a positive experience for some people who are in desperate circumstances if the programs are available.

We need to have an attitude that recognizes that there is individual responsibility, and nobody is suggesting that everybody in prison is there because they have somehow been wronged. However, we do know there are socio-economic factors. We do know there are people with serious needs that are not being met in society, whether it be drug addictions that they have no way of dealing with or whether it be mental health issues that are improperly or inadequately addressed in society.

We do know there is high unemployment in many parts of this country. We have significant problems in the aboriginal communities as a result of many factors which I will not go into here. There is a whole series of issues that have led to that situation.

We cannot say the answer is to just increase the sentences, which we have often heard from the government. Putting in mandatory minimum sentences as a deterrent to people committing crimes is something we know does not work and has even been recognized very recently by the Supreme Court of Canada. The research shows, and has been confirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada, accepted by the highest court in the land in a recent decision, that mandatory minimum sentences as such do not in fact deter crimes.

The government is anxious to continue to make prison a situation which is negative, not only for the prisoner, obviously, but also for corrections guards. When the government starts talking about zero opportunities for parole forever, what will that do for the safety of corrections officers? What will it do if a prisoner has no hope whatsoever of ever getting out and nothing to lose? Even if there is a faint hope, it is still some sort of hope.

It the metrics of that are changed and we say to the prisoners that no matter what happens, no matter what they do, they are not getting out ever and the circumstances are going to be worse, will that help the safety of corrections officers? I think the answer is pretty obvious. It does not at all.

We have to do something different from what the government is doing, because what the government is doing, frankly, does not work.

We support the bill because it would in fact put to place in legislation a practice that already exists. We are okay with the legislation. We are happy to see it pass, but we do not want to let his opportunity go when we pass legislation that has a short title of drug-free prisons act, which is clearly a misnomer, is clearly a propaganda title and is clearly wrong. The long title of the bill An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, which is fine.

In fact, a motion was made in committee to amend the legislation and, of course, the motion was not allowed. We tried to fix it. I want Canadians to know that even though we support the actual terms of the legislation, what it stands for and what it says, we do not like the title. We tried to change it and it was ruled out of order because there was no amendment to the bill that would lead to a change in the title being required.

What do we have? As of March 14, 2012, the national penitentiary population was 15,000. If 20% of them, nearly 2,400 people, are waiting for a program for drug abuse and substance abuse, then we have a serious problem. If this legislation is followed through, those people would stay in prison longer, they still would not get the programs they need and eventually they would have to be released when their sentences ended. When that happens and they did not have access to the programs, we will have a continued problem for our society, despite the government's claim that it cares about victims. I think we all care about victims. In fact, we care about victims to the point that we want to see fewer of them. One way to do that is to ensure that people who are incarcerated get the rehabilitation programs and support they need to allow them a greater chance of living a life of less crime when they get out and to participate better in society.

Let us talk about some of our other programs. When we talk about a mandatory $15-a-hour minimum wage, that is really designed as well to allow people to have a decent opportunity to make a living and support themselves. When we talk about other programs we are promoting, that is also about ensuring that prisoners who get out of jail and want to be productive members of society can have proper rehabilitation programs so they have those opportunities and a better chance of not reoffending.

There was a lot of talk about supporting victims and victims' bills of rights, but the current government has done nothing to help the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board program that has existed in our country for many years. When it was established, the federal government support was based on the dollar formula of 90/10. It provided victims of crime with compensation for losses they incurred as a result of crime. The government has done nothing about that. It brought in its so-called victims' bill of rights, but it did nothing on the plus side to provide something that would help with their problems associated with the crimes against them.

We want prisons to be a safe workplace for correctional staff. We want prisoners to be rehabilitated. We want to have them access government programs so when they are released, they are in a better position to lead a crime-free life. If part of their problem is mental health or drug addiction and rehabilitation programs can help fix that, we need to put more money into prison programs to make that possible.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

Although we support the bill, I would like to take this opportunity to point out just how much the Conservatives’ approach does not work, even though they say they are the best ones to handle law and order issues. My colleague gave an excellent example of this in his speech: mandatory minimum sentences. In the United States, even the Republicans, who are often hand in glove with the Conservatives ideologically, are rejecting that idea as a way of reducing crime rates in our communities.

When it comes to drugs in the prison system, we also have to consider health and prevention. Of course, people have addiction problems, and I do not understand why we would not be considering solutions to address that.

As my colleague said in his speech, we could offer programs within the prison system to start reducing the incidence of these problems and healing these people and then, as he put it so well, avoid crimes being repeated. The best way to protect victims is to make sure that people are not in a position where they want to commit crimes, and I think we can do that by focusing on rehabilitation.

On that point, would my colleague like to say more about the fact that in spite of the new laws being enacted, very little is being done to offer more resources? We see cuts being made and a lack of financial resources in the prisons.

What does my colleague think?

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for reminding the House of the fact that the government is bucking the trend. In the United States for example, the trend had been to be far more harsh on prisoners, with more use of mandatory minimum sentences, solitary confinement and other methods. The Americans have recognized that this does not work. Some of the more right-wing states that had a tradition of being so-called tough on crime, as the Conservatives like to call themselves, are recognizing that some of the measures they have chosen lead to greater crime in their communities and to less safe communities. It is a bit of an enlightened approach even for those who take that ideological point of view.

The Conservatives government does not seem to get it. However, I hope that when the government changes in the fall, we will have an opportunity to put more resources into ensuring that rehabilitation programs are available and that prison conditions are more conducive to rehabilitation. That way, when people leave prisons, they will be better citizens and less likely to commit crimes.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague is always intelligent when he helps people.

The NDP has been steadfast in our support for measures that will make our prisons safe. Meanwhile, the Conservative government has ignored recommendations from Correctional Service staff and the correctional investigator that would decrease violence, gang activity and drug use in our prisons. Multiple stakeholders across the country agree that this bill would have a minimal impact on the drugs in our prison system.

Recently the Conservatives cut $295 million to the operating budget of Correctional Service Canada, which likely has impacted the already small portion of the funding that is dedicated to core correctional programming. Meanwhile, they have invested $122 million into failed interdiction tools, even after the stakeholders and experts in the field have said that drug-free prisons are not achievable. Experts have said that we need to invest in rehabilitation programs for our prisoners and the Conservatives have shown that is not something they are interested in doing.

My colleague said that we needed to invest in more programming to support our prisoners, so when they left the prison system recidivism would be lowered rather than maintained at the same rate. Could my colleague comment on that?

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Speaker, it is a serious situation when the government makes things worse and less safe for our communities by taking the money out of the prison program that could be used for substance abuse programs or other programs that would help to rehabilitate offenders, help them with mental health issues and to provide substance abuse programs. It would leave us all in a situation where, when they came out of prison, they would be in better shape than when they were when they went in. We do not want them in the same frame of mind with the same problems if they can be addressed inside prison. We want it to be a positive experience. Instead, what we have is money taken out of the system and conditions becoming worse, and that is not good for society.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have been in the House since this morning and I have listened to the debate very carefully. It is almost deafening that the government and Liberal members are not participating in this debate. Why? Surely, if the government is presenting a bill, it would want to defend it and root for it.

Is it because it is an indefensible bill? The title of the bill would not really address the real issue of drugs in prisons. It would just provide a legal avenue for the Parole Board to use urine samples to deny parole, which is already a practice. One would think that for a bill like this, the government would be getting up, cheering and defending it, letting Canadians know what is happening in the House of Commons.

Would the member care to comment on that?

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Surrey North makes an interesting point. I see members opposite, apparently unwilling to get up and talk about this. I suspect there is one reason why. I do not really believe that anybody over there is happy to get up to try to defend the fact that they have called this bill the drug-free prisons act when it would do nothing of the kind. In fact, it has no relation to having drug-free prisons at all. I think the member for Yukon and the committee recognized as much by acknowledging that the title was a bit of an overreach. That is a pretty big admission from the other side.

In fact, it is more than an overreach. It is something that is really indefensible and that is why we do not see anybody on the other side getting up trying to defend it.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, following in a similar vein to my previous question, we know that mental health is a significant problem in our communities across the country. In the intake interviews with prisoners, there is quite a significant number of prisoners who go into our prison system with identified mental health issues.

Instead of complaining, I would like to hear proposals or propositions of how we could make changes. What should we do as responsible legislators to ensure that the occurrences of mental health issues and concerns with our prisoners as they exit the prison system can be reduced, rather than increase or stay the same. According to many studies, mental health continues to be a problem, rather than being resolved or worked on while our prisoners are in the system.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I will quote Catherine Latimer, the executive director of the John Howard Society, who talked about what we could do for people who were out on parole. She said:

We want to enhance the likelihood that communities would be safer. We do that by a supported, targeted parole reintegration scheme that looks at the needs of the individual and how to support those needs.

On the way in to prison, when individuals are taken in and assessed at the beginning, there has to be a program that assesses the addiction problem and provides a proper correctional program for that offender. Without addiction treatment, education and proper reintegration upon release, a prisoner will likely return to a criminal lifestyle and possibly create more victims. That is what we are trying to prevent.