Perhaps I can do it, Mr. Cotler, with reference to the question you put to Mr. Doob about what empirical evidence is ignored in these amendments.
One of the themes of the amendments is to toughen up, in the name of accountability, prison conditions to counteract what is perversely and inappropriately referred to as a “Club Fed” atmosphere in federal prisons. I spent 40 years working in federal prisons. They are not Club Feds, and I challenge anyone who would say otherwise.
One of the examples of toughening up the conditions is the way in which the amendments state that they will modernize the regime of segregation. Segregation is the regime under which Ashley Smith died two years ago. It's the harshest, most draconian form of imprisonment known within the borders of Canada. It has been the subject of comment of many parliamentary committee reports.
Indeed, the five-year review of this committee recommended that administrative segregation, which can be indefinite, should never be imposed except through the order of an independent adjudicator, not a CSC official. Due to CSC recalcitrance, that recommendation has not been implemented. It has been repeated by the human rights committee, by the correctional investigator, in academic writings. Every body that has looked at this dispassionately has come up with this recommendation.
It is not in the amendments, and yet this is meant to be the modernization of the regime.
What is in the amendments is that if a prisoner is sentenced, as a punishment, to segregation, one of the sanctions that would now be allowed is to cut off any visits with the outside world—friends or families. CSC's own empirical evidence demonstrates that one of the most important elements of prisoner reintegration, one of the most important elements of ensuring that prisoners are not violent and are compliant with the correctional regime, is having contact with their loved ones.
Why would you do that? Why would you add that condition of confinement to an already rigorous regime? How does it contribute to public safety? How does adding the pains of imprisonment to an already hardened group of people make them better people, so that when they come back into our society they can be our neighbours and not our predators?