A number of years back, when, in the province of Saskatchewan, the idea of house arrest was going to be used for bail, there was a very skeptical judge at the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal. His name is Bill Vancise. Bill Vancise was skeptical enough to run the experiment on himself and to find out whether this was really incarceration. He wanted to know whether it felt like imprisonment or was just being at home. He wrote a paper, which I would suggest to all of you, called “Home Alone-But Not Forgotten”. The result of his experiment on himself was that there was a very real sense of confinement.
Confinement can be physical. It can also be psychological. Restraint on liberty is a kind of confinement. That's why our Supreme Court of Canada has stated that arrest and detention can also be a psychological state. It's a very real phenomenon. In fact, in a lot of these cases it's not quite as simple as sitting at home and having a drink and that's that. No. In a lot of these cases there are very severe conditions about what you can and cannot drink or do, but there are also very serious reasons why you've been given that conditional sentence of imprisonment: because you have a full-time job and children depending on that income; because there's no purpose in sending the whole family into a poverty cycle; because it makes more sense to keep you being a contributing member of society.
There was some testimony before this committee a number of days ago about what happens if the offender lives next door to the victim. Conditions prohibit that from happening, but there are some places, some small communities in Canada, where counsel have reported that in fact there's a huge effect on the offender who can't just leave the community. He can't just commit a crime and leave. He has to face those people who he's known his whole life, on a day-to-day basis, and that has its own effect as well. So no, it's not a picnic at home.