Again, I think the biggest issue that I'm coming across is the poverty in our community. People can't afford to get out of the community. They can't afford to go places and that needs to be addressed.
This discussion is fantastic, but if we don't address the underlying poverty issues, when people get out of prison, they're going to relapse, so they're going to go back to what they know. They don't have enough money to survive and that's the only way they know, so you're going to have drug dealers come out and they're going to go right back to it.
I've seen homeless people in my community and ask them, “Why are you homeless today?” They say, “It's because we don't have a bank account”. If you don't have a bank account, you can't get your EI cheques direct-deposited. They're homeless. We're talking about 20-year-old kids that are homeless like that because of these rules that we have. We need to address those rules. There needs to be more money for these kids, when they finally come out of something like that. The one volunteer who I'm dealing with right now was clean and sober for 11 weeks, but she was stifled. She was stuck in her apartment and she couldn't go anywhere, so she relapsed.
There needs to be more sports and more things need to be available. There has to be programming available. It has to be easier.