Public Safety Committee on Dec. 10th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Please be brief.

[Glenn Thompson]

I think that's a good subject for the next phase of the national strategy. I don't mean to duck the question, but there has been a debate for as long as I've been around the system, for the last 50 years, about how much the provincial health care apparatuses should be engaged with the federal offender populations. In my opinion, the provinces' health care systems should be more engaged with these people.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Davies, please.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Thompson, for your very well laid out presentation.

My first question is this. In your presentation you say that your personal experience with correctional services over the years has been that the system has shifted from one set of programs and beliefs to another, without sufficient research to ever know what has the best effect. I wonder if you can tell our committee if there's anything that stands out to you that has had a good effect, something positive in the system that we might use as an example to build on in terms of helping with the mental health and substance abuse issue.

[Glenn Thompson]

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.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

To summarize, it sounds like what you're saying is that we need to have, in our federal correction system, a diverse range of programs to deal with mental health effectively, ranging from vocational programs to prison farms to therapeutic aspects.

Is it your view that we are doing that presently in the system?

[Glenn Thompson]

I don't think anybody would say that the Correctional Service of Canada or any of the provincial services have the diversity of programs and the ability to put people in them in the right level of custody, which is another serious problem when you're running correctional programs. Neither is the diversity there nor the ability to house people with the right kind of staff at the right time. Training is a terrific kind of requirement in these types of facilities. You can't just start a therapeutic community program tomorrow and hope it's going to work.

The answer, unfortunately, has to be no, I think.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

I want to touch on something you haven't spoken about, and I wonder if you have a view on it.

There may be some disagreement on this committee, but it appears to some of us that we've been using segregation as one tool for placing difficult-to-manage prisoners. Maybe we all feel there's a role for segregation in some cases, but there's a concern that as the number of mentally ill inmates grows in our prison population, some of them are being put into segregation.

I wonder if you have any comments to help us understand that issue.

[Glenn Thompson]

I just reflect back on experiences I had when I was a correctional services superintendent—or warden, as the federal system calls them. I used to laugh and say I got same-day service from the psychiatric system at the time. My physician would send a mentally ill person over to a psychiatric hospital and they'd be back the same day, because the psychiatric hospital would say, “We don't have the security to handle those people. Why on earth are you sending them to us?” So that's a good example of the health care system at that time not being ready to handle those most difficult people--neither are they today, for the most part.

In fact, in psychiatric circles I think you'd find people saying that we really don't have psychiatric methods to handle many of these people. Obviously there's something wrong with them, and we don't have a good prescription for them these days.

So correctional staff—wardens and senior staff in institutions--end up putting people in segregation who have no business there, because they don't know what else to do with them. I think that's the serious problem. Then when you put somebody in that state in a secure cell with nothing around them, they're not going to get better, for sure.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Your time is up. Do you have a brief supplementary?

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Do you have any suggestions on what we could do with those people?

[Glenn Thompson]

Sure. I'd get them out of the regular population and into a psychiatric centre run by CSC with enough security to handle them. Some people won't respond to that well, but better there than slog away under the supervision of some poor warden, senior staff, and correctional officers who are trying to look after this person and know very well it isn't going to work.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you very much.

We'll go over to the government side now.

Mr. Norlock, please.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Thompson, for your attendance here. I can already see something positive coming from your attendance here, just because you've given us clear direction as to where we need to start. You have to crawl before you walk, sort of thing. I'm glad you use the progressive approach.

Near the end of your testimony—I don't find anything humorous about this—you said you had same-day service. My background is policing in Ontario, and occasionally we would have someone put on a form 1. Because of my northern location, we'd occasionally send them to a local facility to be assessed. Often they would be back in the community even before we were back. So we had same-day service also. That's not a complaint; it's just the reality. And I understand the complexity.

You started by talking about the stigmatization of people with mental illnesses, not only in the community at large but in the very institutions where people with mental illnesses go for treatment, and in correctional services. Since we're charged with the specific area here of correctional services, could you suggest a program that you're aware of--perhaps from a provincial perspective, which is your background--that might not be in existence in the Correctional Service of Canada and that this committee could recommend?

[Glenn Thompson]

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.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much for that.

What I'd like to see us talk about on the committee in our recommendations is, one, how do we not get these types of persons in our maximum security prisons, or even medium, for that matter? How can we divert them after they've committed a crime?

You mentioned in response to one of the questions that some of them may have committed such a serious crime that there needs to be a certain level of security that may not be in existence currently. I'm referring to, of course, our experience in Saskatoon, where they basically have switched the institution from a prison to a hospital. They treat their people more like patients rather than inmates. And we saw quite a diversity.

So if you could, in as succinct a way as possible—and I know that can be different, but just hit on the key notes—talk about once they're in the court system, how we can divert them to the proper location. The practical part that we're dealing with here, as a country, is that we're heading into deficit, as is the rest of the industrialized world, or the whole world almost, so we may be prepared to put some funding in, but maybe somewhere along the line here today you could talk about maybe reallocating funds from things that don't work to things that do, and you could comment on that. And then perhaps you could comment on what do we do with people afterwards. You've already talked about that a bit, and you mentioned two places, one in Toronto, Operation Springboard, and the St. Leonard's Society.

So I wonder if you could talk about that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

We're out of time, but I'm going to take the liberty to let you give an answer to that.

[Glenn Thompson]

You saw the facility in Saskatoon. There's one nearby here, in Brockville, which I'd recommend you have a look at as well. The Royal Ottawa Hospital runs it; it is a provincial institution. Correctional officers run the security side; therapeutic staff—Ottawa Hospital staff—run the inside. It works for people.

I know a person who, in a psychiatric condition, murdered his child and was placed in that facility by the courts. He has responded well to treatment, and I had contact with him while I was in the Canadian Mental Health Association. The other day he sent me an e-mail and said he had his release. He's been out in the community, back living with his family. He's now fully out of custody, as it were--out of supervision.

It has worked for this person. If we had put him in a regular facility and had him sit there for 20 years, what would we have had at the end of the day? He is back with his family; he is working; he is making a life for himself and his family. So I'd have a look at that kind of facility. You just saw one that is similar.

We need an intermediate facility. We need to connect whatever is put into existence in institutions—that variety we spoke about earlier, which Mr. Davies was dealing with—out to the community as well. The person who is in whatever facility it is or whatever kind of program it is has to go to some facility that connects to it out in the community. It can't just be a complete sort of chop, from one kind of program to another.

St. Leonard's has handled all sorts of complex persons over the years, and so has Operation Springboard. They are two good examples of organizations that know what they are doing, in my opinion, in terms of handling people in the community who are difficult and, some people would say, sometimes dangerous, I suppose.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you very much.

We'll go over to Mr. Kania now, please, for five minutes.

[Andrew Kania, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Sir, here is a quotation from your presentation:

Many young persons with early symptoms of mental illness are overlooked while years go by and their illness becomes much more difficult to treat. Some of these individuals are certain to end up in trouble with the law as young adults.

I perfectly agree. Part of what we have discovered is that a great proportion of persons who are incarcerated have these difficulties. From my perspective concerning our report, the first part of it, in my view, should be prevention, because if you can prevent people from committing crimes by curing their mental difficulties or their addictions—which was the other part of it, though I won't ask you about that—obviously we are doing something in advance to keep the prison population down and to help people.

I'd like you to be very practical and specific, if possible. I have seen this pamphlet and I know you have done good work. What should we be doing on a very practical basis to try to prevent this? Is it as simple as having psychiatrists or somebody go into schools? What ideas have you come up with to try to prevent this at an early stage?

[Glenn Thompson]

It certainly isn't simple, and there's no uniform way to do it.

For example, yesterday I attended a meeting in Toronto, where agencies that are dealing with the Somali community, the Caribbean community, and the Tamil community are working with a different approach from just straight individual mental health or psychological care for individuals. They are trying to connect the community into it, to do it in a way that connects to the spiritual beliefs of these folks and to their community. Many of the newcomers to Canada have very strong family connections, very strong spiritual connections. They may also get into trouble with the law; they may also have a mental illness. One has to develop a program that connects all of those dots, I think.

That's what this group of staff are trying to do. It's a very interesting set of programs that's being researched. These are people who are meeting midway through a project to assess it. I was there listening attentively, as a Mental Health Commission person. There are examples of programs like this, which are going to be preventative.

I think we need to do much more with our newcomers to Canada who have come from traumatic situations. Some of the people I was in the room with yesterday have lived lives in other countries, before they came here, that I would never imagine. If we don't do something better than we're doing at the moment with many of those people, some of them are going to fall off the train. They're going to end up in the hands of the Correctional Service of Canada some time along the line and be in great difficulty, like those Hungarian folks I spoke about whom I was involved with way back in 1959. If those young men hadn't got into that positive program in that institution, they might have very well ended up in serious grief later on. Having a coherent program with many facets is something that simply has to be done, if we're going to be preventative.

The Canadian Mental Health Association and others—the Mood Disorders Association, the Schizophrenia Society—spend most of their time trying to be preventative, trying to educate the community to deal differently with the mentally ill and substance abuse population. We could all learn a lot from the kinds of programs they've had that are working—because they are working, in many cases. They're very weakly funded, for the most part. We have a habit of waiting until people sort of hit us over the head with a serious offence before we act on many of these things.

The gist of your question, I think, is that we should be intervening earlier, and we certainly should. They're doing that in schools—and not just with psychiatrists, I think; many people with less advanced training can do that kind of work in schools and intervene early. In the U.S., you would be much more likely to see a social worker and then a psychologist before you got to see a psychiatrist. In Canada, our habit has been to go in with guns blazing. If you have a psychiatric illness, we often take you to the most highly trained person first. We don't fund psychologists the same way; we don't fund social workers the same way. That's another factor.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Be very brief. You're out of time, Mr. Kania.

[Andrew Kania, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

It's because of the nature of the question.

Do you have something, once again on a practical basis—for example, a 10-point plan—about which you could say to us “enact this, work on this, solve this”. You're here in the Parliament of Canada; there's a lot we can do. I'm looking for those sorts of recommendations to assist with this.

If you can't do it now, is it something you can go back to work on with your people to provide to us?

[Glenn Thompson]

Absolutely, yes. I was just going to say that there are others who are much more expert than I am in prevention promotion activities, and lots has been written and said about it that is practically being used and is in place at the moment.

I'd be more than happy to do that, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you very much.

We'll go over to the government side now, to Mr. McColeman. for five minutes, please.