The Correctional Service of Canada right now has empty cell capacity of maybe between 800 and 1,000, scattered across the country. So if you were to take a very high-level look and you say, gee, we've got empty cell space, so if more people come into a penitentiary, we must be able to accommodate them, you might be able to draw that conclusion.
The reality is that with the mix of the offender profile, with the issues to do with gangs, with the mentally ill, with the special concerns of women or aboriginal offenders, that capacity isn't in the right place at the right time; it's not available. We have overcrowding, particularly at medium security, where the vast majority of offenders spend the vast majority of their time. That's where they're stacked up and wait-listed for those programs. That's where there is no intermediary care for their mental health needs. That's when they're not getting into those core correctional programs that were identified in their correctional plan to facilitate their conditional and safe release into the community. We know through research that the safest way to release offenders into the community is gradually under supervision, not just send them out cold turkey at the end of their sentence.
So the concern I have is that without additional capacity, both human and financial, without addressing some infrastructure issues, the Correctional Service of Canada cannot meet an increased burden of offenders, period. If you include in that the realities of operating a correctional system, realities such as the largest medium security institution in the Atlantic region locked down for days on end because there was information that there was a dangerous article in the institution.... Under the Canada Labour Code, quite rightfully, staff decided it was dangerous to work without exceptional searches. The institution becomes locked down; there's interruption in program access and interruption in routine.
There's another medium security institution in the Pacific region locked down going on three weeks now. That means no institutional movement, restriction to cells, and no access to programs. In that particular institution, of course, problems became much worse because it's one of the few and rare correctional institutions in this country where there are no toilet facilities in the cells. So you have inmates locked in their cells, defecating and urinating in their cells when they can't get access to escorts to toilet facilities. These are not the conditions you would want for adequate rehabilitative or mental health services.