I'd hearken back to a program that the Federal Bureau of Prisons had in place in the U.S. some years ago. I don't know what they're doing these days. They took all of their new recruits--and it didn't matter whether you were a psychiatrist or a correctional officer, or whatever you were--to one or other of the two or three settings they had at the time, and they had a training program for them all in the same place. It didn't matter what your job was going to be; what mattered was that they had an opportunity with you to assure you of the way that the correctional services there, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, wanted you to operate.
From the point of view of having a good start for anybody who begins in the program, in the work area that we're talking about, I think that's one way to do it. Then you're not just left with somebody who has been hired from some other field altogether, started as a correctional officer yesterday, begins in that institution, likely is put on the job too soon in most jurisdictions, and doesn't have enough background and experience. In terms of much more training at the beginning of a person's experience, we can learn at lot from police services in this regard.
I know from my experience at the Canadian Mental Health Association that one of our people there who had a serious mental illness was working as a trainer with the police in Toronto and had, it seemed to me, a very effective relationship with them. He thought his life had been saved by police persons many times, and I think it had. His approach wasn't to be critical; he was just saying, here's what it feels like if you're in a psychotic condition and a group of policemen are coming to get you from somewhere and you're acting very strangely. Here's what it feels like. Here's what I saw. This person had very good recall of what had happened to him. He was more than grateful to the police. That kind of training is something that most correctional services haven't taken time to provide.
So I'd put a lot of stock in training, and retraining.
And then I mentioned in the remarks I made at the start the need for some sort of ability to get something online these days electronically for the correctional services staff that they can refer to any time, on the job or even in their home environment, training materials that are electronically available. People don't remember everything from a two-week course or a three-month course, or whatever it might be, and they need to refer back and think about it as their experience goes along. Today, they maybe had to supervise a person who had a schizophrenic condition. They may want to go and think about that and read about it and find out more about what other people have learned to do in that kind of situation.