Public Safety Committee on Nov. 1st, 2011

[Kenneth Putnam]

It's a battle forever, I believe, and I base that statement on the fact that I've spoken to many recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. Alcoholics will never tell you that they're not alcoholics any more. They always say they're a recovering alcoholic. It's the same with drug addictions and it's the same with cigarette smoking.

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

That's because they're all addictive.

My questioning before had to do with the types of drugs people are on and how they affect the person with just a few usages. Now we get to drug interdiction in prisons. It's rather hard to sneak a case of 24 beer or a 26-ounce bottle of liquor into a prison, but it's relatively easier to get a packet of cocaine or crack cocaine in a condom placed in a body cavity or ingested with a triple condom—those kinds of drugs, especially crack cocaine and other types of drugs like it.

This is for Mr. Van De Mortel.

These types of drugs in and of themselves can cause the kind of problem in prison that you had. That's point number one, if you'd comment on it.

Number two is, what is your institution doing about the brew situation now that this occurrence has taken place? What types of measures did your institution take to search for and dissuade people from getting involved with the brew mix?

[Tony Van De Mortel]

On the first point, yes, I agree with your statement.

What our institution did initially was pretty much rearrange that whole unit. We used to have benches in there, which prevented officers from getting there more quickly and just got in the way during fights. We removed the benches.

We added two more cameras in that unit. We had never had cameras in the cells before; they had the whole cell, and that was a blind spot for the whole institution. So we added cameras in those cells. As far as the cell units go, we try to do our searches a little more often. We're just more vigilant about our officer presence, walking through the unit. They know that officers are there and that we are watching and trying to dissuade them from making brews.

They have taken a lot of the juices away for snack time. They have snacks on weekends, and that's where they were getting a lot of their juices. We've eliminated juices during snack time; they get no drinks at that time at all, no drugs. That's pretty much what we've done so far.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Norlock. You had an extra eight seconds there.

We'll now move back to Mr. Scarpaleggia.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

I'd like to continue along the line of questioning of Mr. Sandhu, when he was talking with Mr. Van De Mortel about the incidence of violence. If I understood correctly, you said it has gone down.

[Tony Van De Mortel]

In the three and a half years...it has gone down from when I started, yes.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

What is the reason for that? Can you point to a specific factor?

[Tony Van De Mortel]

Direct supervision has helped, knowing that there's more of an officer presence, that we're in the units. That's probably one of the biggest factors: more officer presence.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

And yet you said before that because of budget constraints, there still aren't enough officers present to properly control the consumption of drugs and alcohol in the prison. In fact, when we were visiting Joyceville, I think it was, they were telling us once again about how drugs can be thrown over the prison wall; they said they have patrols and that the patrols can be effective, but they don't have enough of them, and so on.

It seems to be that one of the areas in which we could make some progress is in giving more resources to correctional facilities to hire more officers and do more patrols. It sounds as though that alone would have a marked impact on violence and on drug use. Would you agree?

[Tony Van De Mortel]

I would agree with that, yes.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Going back to the issue of searches of visitors, when we were at Collins Bay, they said to us that every visitor must go through an ionizer scanner and also that they could be introduced to a sniffer dog, if you want to put it that way. If there were a suspicion that they were carrying drugs, there could be a physical search, but only if the person signed a waiver and only if it's conducted by medical professionals.

Is that correct? Is that how it works in your facility?

[Tony Van De Mortel]

Actually, in our facility, we don't have the dogs. We don't have the ion scanner. All we pretty much do with visitors is use a metal wand. We are unable to do any kind of search on--

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

That's a bit shocking. I mean, it is a federal institution.

[Tony Van De Mortel]

No, it is not. It is territorial.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

It's territorial. But you don't just have people in there who have done less than two years.

[Tony Van De Mortel]

No, we are two years less a day.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

I see, okay.

Actually, related to that, we learned that sometimes it's those with the longer sentences who are the easiest to manage. We learned this at Collins Bay. It's their home at this point, and they don't want people coming in on short sentences disrupting the routine and that kind of thing. But as you say, they're all on short sentences in your prison.

You said there were different classes of inmates. Is it by length of sentence? You seemed to mention, unless I misunderstood at the beginning, that part of the prison was for people in remand. They are being held.

[Tony Van De Mortel]

Oh, no, they're all mixed.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

They're all mixed, the longest sentence to the shortest--

[Tony Van De Mortel]

Yes, they're all mixed.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

—are all together.

[Tony Van De Mortel]

Yes.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Is that a problem?

[Tony Van De Mortel]

I don't understand it to be. I don't think so, no.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Okay. It might be a problem where you're mixing maximum security with medium and minimum, perhaps, but you don't have that problem there.