In this area, we're pursuing both an institutional and a community-based strategy. We received money last year to put in place a stronger support mechanism and service delivery component for individuals who are going out into the community with mental health issues. I think we're in a very good position to make some gains there.
Before, individuals with mental health problems who were being released into the community were basically left to tap into existing community resources, which, as everybody knows, are overtaxed right now. So we received moneys to put in place a more comprehensive approach to deal with these individuals.
Currently within the Correctional Service of Canada, we're revising our institutional mental health strategy. We're looking at how we currently use our regional treatment and psychiatric centres, at what the best programming delivered in those facilities should be, and at which categories of offenders with mental health issues are the best ones to go to those very specific facilities with more targeted psychological and psychiatric types of services.
At the same time, we're looking at what kinds of support services—such as ambulatory care support—should go into the mainstream institutions to support those individuals, because the number of beds we have in our specialized treatment centres don't match the number of individuals with mental health problems.
Regardless of what we do on the institutional strategy side, we will always have individuals with some form of mental health problem sitting in the mainstream institutions. So we need to have some capacity there to address their needs, until they can either access the specialized program interventions in those facilities or are released and able to tap into the community interventions that are being put in place.