I think the question of whether a prison can provide a good psychiatric treatment environment has to be answered with a no. First of all, psychiatry is generally referred to across the country, as Senator Kirby said, as the poor cousin. So psychiatry within corrections would be equally low. It's not a high priority. The institutions that we have for psychiatry are prisons first and treatment facilities second.
If you compare our psychiatric facilities in prisons with community psychiatric hospitals like the Philippe Pinel Institute in Montreal--which I hope you could visit--it's a completely different environment. When you go into the Pinel Institute there are no custody staff on the ranges, whereas in our federal institutions there are more custody staff than mental health workers. Staff are assigned to particular inmates and they work with them continuously, in the day, at night, in their yards, and in their recreational areas. It's a completely different model, and I hope you have a chance to see what the difference is when you're a hospital first as opposed to a prison first.
The fact is that a psychiatric institution within a large correctional system is still a small problem. The policies that are going to take precedence deal with the big issues, the budget issues, the working of the federal institutions generally, and very seldom are the mental health issues accommodated. For instance, in the current context we're talking about the abolition of statutory release. Well, statutory release abolition will have a huge disproportionate impact on anyone who's disadvantaged, and particularly the mentally ill. What we will be doing in effect is releasing more and more people into the community with serious mental illnesses and without either support or supervision. That kind of criminal justice approach for the mentally ill is simply incompatible with what we know is the best way to address mental health issues.
We do have examples of different models in this country that I think would be very instructive for you to consider. Otherwise, we end up with systems that simply recycle people, as Mr. Christopherson was mentioning.
If we don't make a change, if we can't bring together the proper treatment, if we don't have the proper reintegration support for people re-entering the community, you can be sure that being as vulnerable as they are, having the difficulty they have day by day in their lives, they will be back at the door in short order--and not necessarily for serious crimes. Interestingly, the research department has shown that actual criminal recidivism is not any higher among those with mental illness than for those who are not designated with mental illness, but it's because of the social environment.