Justice Committee on Sept. 21st, 2006

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Well, we're all trying--in the system.

I'll ask you some specific questions about your presentation, not getting off on tangents about money and victims. The $250 million it might cost to build these prisons is $250 million that might improve the infrastructure of universities in Mr. Moore's region and mine, and reduce tuition fees--something important for the community.

Let's talk about page 6 now, getting back to the slides. I'd be interested to know--and I don't want to generate a lot of work--if you have some facts on the countries that look like they'd be doing better in terms of lower incarceration rates--that being only one aspect of how a community deals with its problems. The other stats, of course, that are important to citizens are on the rate of crime in general. I'd love to know for all of these countries what the rate of crime is. Maybe that's hard or easy to get--again, I don't want to put you to too much work--but it would seem to me that would be important.

I've never been to Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. They told me that by coming to Parliament I'd travel the world. I've just travelled between here and Moncton. But the other aspect is, do these countries have regimes of conditional sentencing and probation and that sort of thing? If there's generally available information, point us in the right direction and we'll find it through our research bureau or otherwise.

That, to me, would complete a picture that page 6 doesn't complete. Incarceration isn't everything. The whole context is important, I think, if I could just make that point.

Slide 16--just cleaning up here--speaks for itself, but there was some testimony, Ms. Barr-Telford, that you wanted to be clear that the individuals in this chart did not reoffend, they got reinvolved with the corrections system. I'm a bit like Mr. Thompson here. I'm not really sure I understood that at all. I pretended to; I nodded. But I didn't understand what that meant at all. What's the difference? Don't you have to offend to be involved, or do you just have to breach to be involved?

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

One can certainly make the link that you need to offend to be involved, but you can also offend and not be involved. That's the difference. For example, one can commit an offence and not end up in the corrections service. That's the difference in these data.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

But when you say “offend” in that context, is it someone who has offended who has been charged?

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

Within this graphic that we're displaying, these are folks who have been returned to the correctional system within 12 months.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

But they haven't necessarily reoffended?

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

What I was trying to say is that we can only in this chart speak to those who end up back in the corrections services. We can't speak to any offences that may have been committed that don't end up back in the corrections services system. That's what we cannot speak to in this graphic.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

And page 15, that's the one that says one-third of conditional sentences were breached, resulting in admission to custody, for those two provinces. What does the term “breached” mean? We have a slide showing what some of the conditions are. I guess, as Mr. Moore says, if you don't stay at home and nobody notices, you're not going to breach, but I guess it means breaching one of the conditions and being caught doing that, right?

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

It means breaching a condition and it also means that the breach was serious enough to result in an admission to custody.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Presumably that's because the probation officer noticed someone didn't meet their curfew, or...likely curfew wouldn't do it, but being drunk in a public place, short of being charged with public disturbance, might be something that ends up being a breach. Is that it--it's discretionary?

[Michael Martin]

These are discretionary, but let's imagine.... It could be anything that reflects the conditions. There are the optional conditions, but there are also what we call standard conditions, such as keeping the peace and being on good behaviour. Essentially the person did not comply with the condition, and the probation officers decided to take action against that individual.

It could be, for example, that he did not attend counselling as he was supposed to. He missed an appointment. Maybe it was just one; it could have been a series of them. It's difficult to say, but at some point a discretionary decision was made that the person wilfully chose not to comply with the condition. Then a warrant is issued for his arrest, usually, and he is returned to custody.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

Thank you, Mr. Murphy.

Mr. Petit.

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you.

I have a question for either Ms. Barr-Telford or Mr. Grimes. Your statistics do not take into account what lawyers refer to as plea bargaining where Crown attorneys manage to have notices of a previous conviction excluded. In many cases, notices of previous convictions should be a factor, but the system is skewed because people are unaware that they have been excluded. The information is on record, but the Crown attorney has it excluded in order to negotiate a lighter sentence with the defence lawyers. That information should be disclosed, because reviewing case files one at a time is an arduous job.

I would now like to talk about aggravated assault. Quebec's Attorney General has instructed that a term of imprisonment automatically be ordered in cases involving spousal assault. There is something odd about your statistics. They always include terms of imprisonment in cases of spousal violence, whereas a suspended sentence could have been an option.

Your statistics detract from the real goal. I'm not saying that for cases of aggravated assault, we should do away with...The statistics for Quebec show that in cases of spousal assault, most men are sentenced to a term of imprisonment. If Bill C-9 were different, men and women would be equal in the eyes of the law. Currently, that is not the case.

I would now like to discuss what happens when parole conditions are violated. You know how it works. A person receives two years' probation. For part of that time, he is under 24-hour supervision, for another part, under supervision during specific hours of the day, and so on. Probation officers are required to work with a land line telephone. With today's methods of communication, a probation officer can call a parolee at 3 a.m., but that person may have arranged to have his calls forwarded to another telephone at another location where he is dealing drugs. It's impossible to keep the parolee under surveillance.

Therefore, to all intents and purposes, probation because like a Club Med vacation where the parolee is free to skirt the rules. The technology exists to allow a probation officer to contact a parolee 24 hours day, but the officer has no way of knowing if the parolee is at home, unless he personally stops by to check on him. Parole officers don't have the time for that, especially not at 3 a.m. Therefore, we have parolees who are violating their parole conditions. Different scenarios are possible, and your statistics do not reflect this reality.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

There are no statistics on plea bargaining.

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Come on! We both know it happens.

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

In our court data, and Mr. Grimes can certainly add to this, we do not collect any information regarding the nature of the undertakings within the procedures. We gather information on the sentences and the natures of the offences and so forth, so to my knowledge we can't speak to the first of the questions you posed. You can correct me, Craig, if you like.

Second, I believe you were asking us about prison sentences in combination with conditional sentences. Michael can certainly speak to that, in terms of our corrections data.

[Michael Martin]

From a sentencing point of view, prison can't be combined with conditional sentencing. However, people on conditional sentence may have had a prior prison sentence, or they may have a subsequent prison sentence.

We can look at those combinations, but in terms of.... I'm not sure if I'm answering the question entirely correctly, but as far as prison and conditional sentence go together, there are situations where it can happen--where a person on a conditional sentence reoffends, is returned to prison, and then is released from prison before their conditional sentence has actually expired, and then they resume supervision. Those types of things can actually take place.

I don't know if that is entirely clear.

[The Chair, Conservative, Art Hanger]

Thank you.

Mr. Lee.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Thank you.

I've got a couple of questions to see if you might be able to generate data.

One of the problems with conditional sentencing, politically, is that from time to time it looks like a problem. Mr. Moore referred to a scenario: it looks as if the justice system hasn't been tough enough on a particular accused or a person convicted.

If I were to give you a particular offence--let's say an aggravated sexual assault--would you be able to generate data that showed how many times a conditional sentence was given for an aggravated sexual assault, if we were to break it down like that?

I realize the sentencing stuff gets difficult and in the sexual assault field it's really problematic now, since the 1980 reforms to separate the more serious from the less serious, realizing of course that it's all serious.

So you could do that, could you? If I gave you an offence you could tell me how many conditional sentences---

[Craig Grimes]

I can break down the data by statute, section, subsection, and paragraph. So where it's complete, at the very least at the section level and depending on the offence at the subsection and paragraph level, it can tell you how many cases there were, how many convictions, and the types of sanctions.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

We may do that; I don't know. It might be an interesting approach to try to address the more serious crimes where, for reasons we're not exactly sure, a conditional sentence was imposed, and the press likes the story and we get some of the facts but not all the facts. So I may look at that later.

Secondly, when the justice minister was here he hazarded a guess at a figure of additional cost that might be there for the provinces for incarceration if we were to move to the regime under Bill C-9. I forgot the number, but it was 20-something million bucks. Would you be able to give us a prison-day incarceration volume that might be there if we went to Bill C-9?

I see the difficulty, because not every case where there's an application of Bill C-9 is actually going to get an incarceration sentence; a judge may move to probation as an alternative sentence, or suspend the sentence rather than giving a conditional.

If I, as a lay person, were to say maybe half the cases now getting conditional sentences in Bill C-9 were to involve incarceration, I could then do a workup mathematically of what it would cost, knowing that it's about $200 a day per inmate. But we'd need some data to show us.

Your charts here come close to that, showing the number of cases that would be affected by Bill C-9, using the current data. So is that data...? Maybe the chart now is good enough. Is it?

[Michael Martin]

Just to clarify a point, we can tell you the average daily cost in the provincial-territorial system, which is right now about $145, if I remember correctly.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

That's before GST and PST, right?

I'm sorry, I shouldn't interrupt.

[Michael Martin]

And that doesn't include capital costs; that's just the operational costs.

The one thing to bear in mind, though, is the difficulty in projecting what kind of prison sentence they might actually get. As you saw in the slide about the length of conditional sentences versus average prison time, there's a very large discrepancy there. We know how long they're getting in conditional sentences, but if we project and say, “What would that sentence be?”, this is where we get into a difficult place, because you would need to know that in order to calculate how many days these people are actually spending inside.

So you would have to hazard a guess, knowing circumstances, priors, and everything like that, on what they actually would be getting for a prison sentence. Once you know that, you're a little closer.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Then you don't have a reliable way of generating for us data that would be fair. I mean, you could hazard a guess, but it would be just a guess. It wouldn't be statistically well-founded.

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

As Michael has said, to produce such an estimate would require making several assumptions in the data.