To take the second part of your question first, I'd say that the impact on anyone with a mental illness who's put in a custody situation is not likely to be a good one at all. Any correctional services agency in the world is faced with a tremendous challenge if a person is admitted who also has a serious mental illness. That person shouldn't be in the general correctional population. The correctional officers aren't trained to deal with those people. The institutional environment isn't a good one in which to deal with them, either.
While I was in correctional services in Ontario, we developed some separate institutions for those persons, such as the regional treatment centres. The Ontario Correctional Institute in Brampton is an example of that type of institution. If those people are in a correctional service institution, they need to be handled separately.
The best thing to do, if it's possible, is to get those people diverted when their first mental illness appears, before they are ever into a correctional services mode at all and before they've ever broken the law. As I indicated in my presentation, we're spending less on mental health care than we were several years ago in Ontario, and that's true across Canada. If we're not spending much, and we're not intervening at the time people are usually seen to be developing mental illnesses—at high-school age or in very early adulthood—time passes, and people often engage in the criminal justice system. Then departments like the Correctional Services of Canada are left to try to figure out what on earth to do and how to back out of the kind of tremendous deterioration that has likely occurred over that period of time. We need to intervene earlier and better. There are all sorts of programs available now that are being tried in some jurisdictions. They're not free. Schools, agencies, and communities have to work together to get those programs in place.
The diversion programs that have begun to happen in the last five years are absolutely terrific in getting that minor offender--who more often than not is somebody who got caught up in some illegal event because of his or her mental illness and kicked in a window or something stupid like that--diverted by the police, the crown attorney, or the court over to a mental health agency. That is happening very frequently now across Ontario and probably elsewhere in Canada. We would very much support that kind of program.
The head of one of the advisory committees for the Mental Health Commission, Steve Lurie of the Canadian Mental Health Association in Toronto, says they are receiving all sorts of people from the Toronto court system in that way. Also important is that they're using the backup service of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto when someone's mental health condition deteriorates beyond their ability to handle it. Just passing somebody off to a mental health agency isn't enough; there needs to be a coherent kind of system out there, or the person will be in difficulty.