Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The first thing I want to do on behalf of all Canadians is thank you, Ms. Pate, and the Elizabeth Fry Society for providing such an essential and profoundly important service to women across this country.
I also want to thank Dr. Ford for all the work you have done in our prisons for the last 25 years. I can tell you must have started quite young.
There is so much to ask on the subject of mental health, and we only have seven minutes. I'll just get to some specific things.
I want to come back to the issue of segregation. I think all members of this committee would probably agree that we're dealing with mental health problems in our prisons by tossing people into segregation. The other thing I hope everybody agrees with at this point is that segregation is probably the worst place you can put someone who is having an acute problem with mental health.
Mr. Sapers puts it best. He says that prolonged periods of deprivation of human contact adversely affect mental health and are counterproductive to rehabilitation.
I do know there are models around the world that are using methods other than segregation. One of them is used at an institution in Britain called Styal Prison, where I understand they have a ten-bed unit. When someone self-harms or goes into some sort of behaviour indicating acute mental illness, the person is sent to that unit and one specific staff member is assigned to that person. Essentially that person is put within a health care setting within the institution.
Do you think that is something we should emulate in this country?