Okay.
Dollar for dollar, the evidence is that you are going to get much better treatment outcomes, including crime reduction, in community-based settings than in prisons. However, if you have to rely on prisons--and I think by the time you're talking about prisons, it's too late for a lot of these guys--then you have to make prisons as humane and just as possible. That means you have to keep your rate of incarceration low and you have to staff your institutions with state-of-the-art psychiatric and psychological staff.
I have to tell you, that is a huge challenge for the service at this time. The way I've had it explained to me is that the service is unable to pay competitive wages for the people they would like to retain. They are routinely poached by the provinces. I talked to a psychiatrist in Vancouver, who is a young mother. She drives one hour to work and from work every day because her family lives in downtown Vancouver and she works an hour out of town. These are the kinds of routine, but very salient human resource challenges that the service encounters.
I've also talked to people in the service, some with long careers, who claim that Canadian practices are among the best in the world if there are resources to deliver them.
But what I have to come back to is that if you want the best outcomes in terms of crime reduction and the actual recovery model of mental illness, then the prison is not your best institution. Dollar for dollar, community-based settings are the most effective.