I would say to you that thinking about offenders as though they're just one particular type of person is like thinking about criminal justice programs as though there is one that will suit all. I've watched this in correctional services in Ontario. When I joined in 1960 we had industrial farms all over the place and some adult training centres. Then we shifted to educational programming. Then we shifted--I'm a social worker--to a therapeutic type of programming. We have moved in recent years, sadly, in my view, to a much more custodial kind of program, very overcrowded and so on.
Each of those types of programs can work for various types of offenders, in my view. So there's no one shoe that fits all of the offender population at all, any more than there is one shoe that fits all of the kinds of mental illnesses that exist and the severity of them. The person with a minor depression is an entirely different person to deal with than a person with a severe psychiatric condition like schizophrenia. So one has to have a very diverse kind of program, and the federal service has tried very hard to do that over the years, I think. It's a tall order to do it.
I've seen at an adult training centre that we had in Brampton--and this will date me--in 1969, where 80% of the people who went into that adult training centre never came back. I did my research and my social work degree on that centre. All of the residents I saw were people who had come from Hungary as new immigrants and had got into trouble with the law here. So 80% of them went out and never came back again, so it had a very high success rate, that particular kind of program for a particular kind of group. If we'd sent a group of people there who were mentally ill and had committed a murder, it wouldn't have worked.
The psychiatric hospital I worked at in England had a therapeutic community model that had been invented in the Second World War for post-traumatic syndrome, then called shell shock. It was used for that population of men, and perhaps some women at that time. By the time I got there, it dealt with people who were called delinquent psychopaths. We had people transferred in from correctional institutions and psychiatric hospitals all over England, and they were in a mess. The research that was done there, carefully done, showed that a third of the people made a very significant improvement. They felt--the people who came there and the staff--that these people were at the end of the line. A third got better, if you want to put it that way, a third were helped significantly, and for a third it didn't work at all.
That program was very intensive and very unusual because the patient population participated in it extensively. There were no drugs. Everything happened in groups. It was very, very unusual. The federal Correctional Service of Canada tried therapeutic community programming at Springhill a few years ago. It has some strengths for some kinds of populations. It won't work for everybody.