Public Safety Committee on June 2nd, 2009

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

I was going to say it has to do with vocational programs that can be used by the inmates when they leave the institution, and there are no jobs in agriculture. That's the problem. The jobs are in autos, furniture-making, factories, etc.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

We'll have to come back. I think there's a whole bunch of questions unanswered, but five minutes from now maybe we can tackle them again.

We'll go over to the Liberal Party. Who is next?

Mr. Oliphant.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Thank you both for being here.

I'm not going to make a speech. I could spend a lot of time agreeing with you. What I'm interested in actually is following up on Mr. Davies' line of questioning. He asked most of the questions I would have asked. And I have spent time in jails—never sentenced—working with offenders, working with COs, and working with a number of issues in jails.

Where is the problem? What you say is common sense. We understand programs help people. We understand we need the foundation for those programs to work. We know there is a cycle. We know prisons are a culture and people learn bad habits there, especially if they don't get early treatment and early better habits. They get worse when they come out, instead of getting better. We've switched the name and we call them correctional facilities, but it's like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four—we are not correcting; we are imprisoning. And the amount of correcting that is going on is actually very small. We know this.

We know drugs get in, and I always laugh because we can't keep drugs out of jails, yet we think we can keep them from coming across our border from the United States. It's ludicrous. We have people who are addicted before they get in, and if they're not, they're addicted by the time they get out.

Where is the problem? I am making a speech now. We know that $1 spent on programming saves at least $4. And I think that's a very modest estimate because we have the whole judicial system. We have the whole property loss. My car was stolen by an addict who was feeding his friends. He was not on drugs when he stole my car. He was one of the four out of five who are an addict coming into jail, not one out of two who did the crime while addicted.

Everything you have said makes perfect, rational sense, but someone is not getting the point. And I think we can tell who's not getting the point from our lines of questioning. But where is the problem?

[Howard Sapers]

I was turning to my counsel for help, and I see that....

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

I'm a philosopher; they're lawyers. So where is the problem?

[Howard Sapers]

You know, I honestly wish I had a pithy, sharp response to that to say where the problem is. Very little of what we have talked about is new in corrections. These tensions and issues have been a feature of corrections for as long as we've had corrections.

The problem, if I could be so bold, is at least in part with fully embracing the mission of the Correctional Service of Canada and making sure that system has the resources and the political support to implement and discharge its mission. Corrections has always been and will probably always continue to be a bit of a football in the political arena. And that's not a comment on this Parliament; it's a comment on the history of corrections in Canada.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

So the public attitudes underneath this need adjustment, because it seems to me that parliamentarians tend to do what the public is thinking.

I worked hard in the Yukon to build a new jail. It was a territorial facility. And yet continually we needed to build a new elementary school. The elementary school will always take precedence over the correctional facility. Kids are nicer than offenders.

How do we get it out to the public that when we help offenders, we're not only helping them; we're helping us and we're helping our kids and we're helping everybody. It seems to me that's a basic fundamental attitudinal shift that as parliamentarians we have to address.

[Howard Sapers]

Yes.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

We're going to spend time agreeing with each other. Fine.

Here's another issue, and this relates to non-corrections facilities, treatment centres. There is a facility in Alberta called Poundmaker's. It's probably one of the best facilities for addictions and mental health for aboriginal people. They will not take sentenced offenders, so judges in the north and with aboriginal communities have this problem where they want them to go to a place like Poundmaker's because they know they'll get treatment, but they have to sentence them to a facility where our judges know they're not going to get treated. This is a huge problem.

How do we integrate these systems so we take our best treatment centres and get their best practices into our jails? Is there a judicial way we can do that?

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

A brief response, please.

[Howard Sapers]

Well, I'll give you an example of another program in Alberta that deals with sex offenders. It also won't receive people as a sentence-receiving institution, but it certainly receives people who are on parole.

The issue is that these are people you normally wouldn't necessarily want to take a risk on paroling, but protocols have been put into place so that people can in fact be granted parole to the secure custody of this particular facility, which is a non-carceral facility but still a very secure facility for the purpose of dealing with treatment. So there are mechanisms to achieve that.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

So there could be a way.

Thanks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you.

Mr. Richards.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Thank you.

I appreciate your being here today.

I want to start off by just pointing out that of course we all know that sometimes we can make statistics say whatever we like. I'd like to point out in your report something that I would call maybe a bit of a misleading statistic. That would be when we talk about the issue of the drug strategy.

Our government announced a pretty significant investment in an important drug strategy back in 2008, just last year, and shortly after that in your report you mentioned that over the last five years--we were talking about our five-year strategy beginning in 2008--you looked back from 2004 to 2009 and indicated that there had been only a 1% decrease in the positive samples in the prisons. I would submit that it may be a bit misleading to talk about the past five years when we're looking at the five years going into the future as far as the drug strategy goes.

I'll tell you that I'm a very strong believer in and a strong supporter of our government's plans in terms of our drug strategy in looking at the things like the drug detector dogs, the ion scanners, and the X-ray machines, etc. I'll tell you the reason I'm such a strong supporter of that. I've been to a number of the prisons, toured them, and talked to the guards on the front lines, the guys who see the measurable differences that strategy has made. What they tell me is that it has made a measurable difference in the prisons. I would submit to you that I would love to see in five years' time the statistics that you would be able to provide, because I believe you would notice a significant decrease in the drugs in our prisons at that time.

It would seem obvious to me that the first step in reducing addictions and drug use would be to eliminate the access to the drugs, so anyone who would argue that the measures we put in place are not important is simply ignoring reality. Of course, there's also a place for treatment programs, and that's an important part of it as well, but we have to remove the access to the drugs as well.

We've all heard the concept that the best social program is a job. I would say that probably applies in our prisons as well. Again, treatment is important, but one of the reasons, and one of the most significant reasons, for recidivism is that prisoners lack skills when they go back out into our society to succeed in the real world. While treatment is important, in order to give the offenders the skills they need to succeed in society, we have to make sure they have employment skills, and we have to make sure that we've been able to create in them the work ethic and habits that are necessary to succeed in those jobs in the real world. It's about giving them the skills to get a good job and to keep that good job.

When I tour the prisons, I often see prisoners spending their time quite idly, sitting around, maybe in their cells, or maybe they're at CORCAN, but they're sitting around and not doing a whole lot. There doesn't seem to be a lot of consequence behind that. As a matter of fact, they're still paid when they're not working. I don't think we're building in them a sense of reality as to how they might succeed in the real world when that's allowed to happen.

I think it's really important that we create those employability skills in our prisoners so that we can help them succeed in the real world. Would you not agree with me that it's important to create those kinds of employability skills, and to make sure we're dealing with the availability of drugs in the prisons so that we can deal with those addiction issues and with giving them the ability to succeed in the real world?

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

There's one minute, Howard.

[Howard Sapers]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much for the line of questions.

It would be terrible on our part if we presented anything that was misleading. Of course, we don't have the predictive ability to look at what these new, latest interventions may result in, in terms of reducing drug use inside prisons. What we present to you is the last five years, the most recent information we have. It's in no way meant to mislead. It's simply to give you the most current information that's available.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

No, l'll just clarify. I certainly wasn't wanting to accuse you of deliberately misleading. I just felt that maybe the way it was presented, it came across that way. I certainly wasn't accusing you of being deliberately misleading.

[Howard Sapers]

Thank you.

I think the important point for my office to you as you undertake your study is to consider the limitations of interdiction alone and to consider the limitations of interdiction based on dealing with just the offender population, because there are lots of ways that drugs come into prisons. It's worth looking certainly at getting rid of access, but I'm not sure that this, in an absolute way, is going to be possible. So what you want to do is limit it in the safest way possible.

I also agree with you in terms of programming and vocation.

Do I have the time now just to refer...?

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

We're out of time. I'm trying to provide equality for all the parties.

[Howard Sapers]

I want to get back to the CORCAN program, the vocational component.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Okay. Well, we'll have another turn on the Conservative side.

We'll now move to the Bloc Québécois.

Monsieur Ménard.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Blake Richards said that prisoners were paid even if they didn't work. I can't help but think that many people feel that, in this respect, we are like prisoners.

Mr. Sapers, I'm going to ask you a very difficult question, and it's related to the esteem in which I hold you. I'm going to ask you to imagine the following situation, which is perhaps not very likely.

The new Minister of Public Safety has just been appointed. He has read some of your reports and summons you to his office. He asks you to advise him and to tell him what his priorities should be. How do you answer him?

[Howard Sapers]

I think those priorities would have to include changing the governance structure of the Correctional Service of Canada so that there is the most senior level of attention being paid to the special needs of aboriginal offenders; making women's corrections facilities directly accountable to the deputy warden for women; increasing the attention paid to and the priority put on mental health services, particularly, again, at the intermediate level, and including the need to immediately create and implement a detailed mental health assessment intake. The shopping list that I would present to the minister would really be encapsulated in our last annual report. We identified previously that many of those systemic issues identified in the annual report have been around for a while.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

One of the things that strikes me in this report is the fact that only 2% of the budget is allocated to programs. What you're suggesting to Mr. Norlock is included in that 2%, I imagine. I'm not surprised at the success he has observed of those programs.

Can you give us an approximate idea of the percentage that should be allocated to programs? I noted that more than 1,000 cells were empty. So it's not the physical facilities that are lacking. Your main problem concerns human resources. Am I wrong?

[Dr. Ivan Zinger]

I'd like to clarify a few points to ensure the committee is well informed.

When we talk about essential programs designed to reduce the recidivism rate, we're not necessarily talking about employment. The employment envelope is different. The $37 million is intended for programs concerning, for example, anger management, sex offence problems, and so on.

I have enormous respect for the employment programs, but you have to be careful. It's not the simple fact of providing a job that will reduce recidivism rates. If offenders continue to have a criminal attitude, if they still have anger management or mental health problems, they will be unable to hold a job. We have to solve those problems and make sure we give them something that is very beneficial to them, like a job that they'll be able to transfer to the community, which will enable them to support themselves appropriately and to be productive. We absolutely have to ensure that they have solved the problems that push them into crime, including substance abuse problems.

The Correctional Service has a role to play with regard to safety, and enormous investments have been made in that, which is a good thing. I agree with other committee members that the investments designed to prevent drugs from entering institutions are very good. However, you have to strike a balance. We can't simply target security problems without ensuring that the Correctional Service is making massive investments in social rehabilitation. I know very well that Quebec is one of the leaders in this area. We have to support young offenders in their efforts to rehabilitate.

It's a question of balance. Ultimately, simply investing in the static and physical security of the institutions won't improve public safety in an optimum manner.