Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I very much value your time. We will try to keep our opening comments concise, but we will definitely go more than the standard ten minutes. I appreciate your indulgence.
I'll get right to it. We sincerely congratulate you on your decision to study this topic at this time. There are considerable challenges facing corrections and the administration of justice in Canada. Of course, today we're going to focus on two particular issues, namely the care and custody of offenders with mental health disorders and access to programs to prepare offenders for their timely and safe release into the community.
Before I go into my more formal, prepared statements, what I want to do is give you a little bit of context. I want to give you a bit of a snapshot of what the Correctional Service of Canada looks like and is facing today.
The Correctional Service of Canada, as you know, is a huge agency. It has a $2.2 billion budget. It employs somewhere around 16,000 men and women. It operates at 58 sites in every part of the country. The workforce, 41% of whom are correctional officers, is represented by six bargaining agents. About 7.1% of the workforce right now are self-identified as aboriginals and about another 5.1% are visible minorities.
The mix of offenders who churn through the system in any given year can be about 25,000, based on admissions and discharges. On any given day such as today, there are about 13,500 men and women in custody in those 58 sites, and perhaps another 8,000 being supervised in the community by parole officers working for the Correctional Service of Canada.
It's a big operation, and it's very complex. The good news is that the majority of the transactions that take place on a day-to-day basis are helpful, appropriate, and lawful. When things work, they work really well. As we'll discuss later in our presentation, unfortunately things don't always go that well, and sometimes they go tragically wrong.
Every day the Correctional Service of Canada produces what's known as a “sit rep” or daily situation report, which highlights significant security or other incidents that have happened in the last 24 hours. This “sit rep” is shared throughout CSC management, and it provides an interesting snapshot and some guidance for the issues that have to be dealt with for the day.
Without breaching any privacy legislation, I want to refer very briefly to the “sit rep” that was issued just a couple of days ago, on May 29. This is just because it was the one that was on the top of my desk; it's not because I picked it in particular.
The first item is labelled as a disciplinary problem at a multi-level women's institution. At approximately 0830 hours, the instigator advised staff that she had taken a large quantity of medication, which she and another inmate had been hoarding. She was assessed by health care and it was determined that at approximately 1730 hours she could be safely managed in her unit. At 1940 hours, the instigator refused to return to her unit. She became verbally resistant and proceeded to lunge at the officers. Physical handling was used to gain compliance. She was escorted to segregation, where she proceeded to self-harm. She ceased her self-injurious behaviour on her own and was subsequently assessed to health care with no injuries. This is noted as a disciplinary issue.
At a regional treatment centre, self-inflicted injuries, May 28: the instigator reopened an existing wound on his arm. Officers observed the instigator on camera and responded with health care. The instigator was uncooperative with staff. Additional staff members attended, and OC—that's pepper spray—was deployed when the instigator became aggressive. First aid was then provided without incident. He was treated by health care and returned to his observation cell.
Here is another self-inflicted injury at yet another regional treatment centre. The instigator was placed in a Pinel system—that's a restraint system—after threatening to self-inflict injuries to an existing wound. The instigator became compliant and was removed from the Pinel system at 1730 hours. That's about three hours in restraints.
Those are just a couple of incidents that happened a couple of days ago that challenged the men and women who work in the institutions and deal with offenders with behavioural and mental health issues.
My purpose in giving you this brief snapshot is that I believe it will help you have a better sense of the rest of the information we are hoping to share with you today. It's one thing to talk in generalities about program access and mental health care; it's something else to understand that we're talking about 13,500 men and women every day--25,000 flowing through the system--challenging a system that is heavily burdened and operating well past its capacity when it comes to mental health and programs.
I'm going to ask my executive director, Dr. Zinger, to provide you with a brief overview and mandate of the role of the office. Following this overview, I'll outline my own concerns regarding the delivery of mental health services to offenders. Then we'll return to Dr. Zinger to talk about access to correctional programs. With that in mind, we'll probably take another 15 minutes and then get into your questions.
Ivan.