Thank you.
Unfortunately, my French is not very good. So I will speak in English.
Electronic monitoring must work because I got noticed at 11 o'clock on Friday night, when I was here briefly in Ottawa, and asked if I could appear at this committee. I'm representing myself. Hopefully my friends in North Carolina, where I live most of the time, will know exactly where I am. I don't want to go to a North Carolina prison, let me tell you, if I breach whatever thing I am under.
I have a number of points to raise. I'll try to be as brief as possible within the 10 minutes. I have provided an outline to the translators because some of the comments are fairly technical. I assume they will be translated, as the clerk has mentioned, for you to peruse later on.
First of all, I'm a researcher. I started working in corrections in 1961 and spent most of my life in Canada. I'm a Canadian citizen, and have worked extensively in the U.S. and some other countries. Part of my job is to evaluate the effectiveness of various kinds of programs. When you compare similar groups of inmates on regular probation versus those on electronic monitoring, the results indicate there are slight increases in recidivism of 1% or 2% for inmates on electronic monitoring versus those who are on regular probation. This is not an outlier result. The standard result for all forms of sanctions—boot camps, drug testing, shock incarceration, in and out of prison quickly, and more versus less prison time—all indicate that there is no effect on recidivism. The sample size we have now from our studies over the years is 500,000.
Secondly, I'm going to give you a lot of information from the U.S. perspective, which may generalize to some extent to my home country here. EM is reserved for low-risk offenders. The general estimate from people in probation, who I work with and deal with in the United States, is that it is three to five times more costly. In addition, when low-risk offenders are revoked for a technical violation—and many of these are trivial, such as you weren't here in the place you should have been, or this and that—what happens is that they are returned to prison. These low-risk offenders who were revoked for a technical violation, which is far removed from a serious or even a minor crime, go back to prison and increase the cost even more so.
Thirdly, electronic monitoring has the danger of being a school for crime, because almost all offenders on electronic monitoring are low-risk. They are sent back to prison. Who is in prison? They are mainly high-risk, serious offenders. If you hang around high-risk, serious offenders, we have data, generated in Canada, that indicates there will be more recidivism. For example, if I keep living about 20 miles from the South Carolina border and keep visiting friends there, I'm afraid I'm going to be a tea partier in the next couple of years. We'll see, but it does work that way.
Electronic monitoring is not foolproof. You get false alarms, you have dead zones, and you have tampering. This was alluded to in the previous presentation. I'll give you a couple of anecdotes of what happens. This is a recent case from when we were chatting with colleagues in the southern United States. An offender was emitting signals from his bracelet that were troubling. The police and probation officers were alerted. They go across town—this is not cheap, mind you—with their sirens blaring. The offender was in the swimming pool, dipping his ankle bracelet in the water. That caused all kinds of alarms, and that led to a crisis. You get those circumstances. They are not common, but even if you have these kinds of breakdowns 10% or 15% of the time, it is an enormous cost to the public.
Electronic monitoring doesn't tell you about the presence or absence of others in your environment, or what they are doing. That's very important to recognize. You could be in a place you shouldn't be in, but you could be with individuals who are pro-social, and you could be doing all kinds of things that are not related to any kind of criminal behaviour. Here are some subtle things that happen with electronic monitoring in our experience. Electronic monitoring produces an enormous amount of information.
I imagine some of your party whips are probably interested in electronic monitoring and applying it to you to see exactly where you might be. Please reassure them it will produce a tremendous amount of information: what grocery store you went to, whether you made a wrong turn on Bank Street, how many times you've been to the LCBO. Who knows? You might even have been talking to an opposition party member.
That sets up an enormous amount of information, and when that happens, it dramatically increases the work of probation officers.
EM, electronic monitoring, sets up a system for wilful negligence if banking hours are kept. In some jurisdictions in America, and possibly in Canada, they've had 9 to 5 electronic monitoring. Say something happens at 5:06 or 3 in the morning; then all heck breaks loose and you have to deal with that situation. Some jurisdictions that had the banking hour electronic monitoring protocol in place have had to go to 24/7 monitoring. If you're going to be monitoring people for 24 hours and you're really afraid of making a mistake when you have these kinds of programs in place, then you're going to have the costs in manpower ramped up considerably.
Here's a subtle point that no one really addresses, but I think it's important. If you put electronic monitoring into a probation service, what you do is you transform the mindset and the professionalism of probation officers. What is your main goal? To survey and monitor people to see if they may in fact be misbehaving themselves. What that means is that probation officers, who are really aware of what their job is and what they will do, will concentrate on looking for technical violations and all sorts of other violations.
It also leads to a CYA orientation to one's work. That leads to more technical violations. In one research project we conducted in New Jersey years ago, we found that probation officers who had a mindset of getting tough and cracking down had technical violations and recidivism rates of their offenders 20% to 30% higher than those who had a balanced treatment versus surveillance approach. So that's an important thing.
Another issue that is raised that you may wish to consider is electronic monitoring for high-risk offenders. I've made that argument in the past, because it seems to me if you want to put someone out in the community for treatment, but they are a high-profile offender and they're at a high risk for committing a crime, you might want to have electronic monitoring. I think that's worth trying. We have no research on that.
But here's the rub. If you're going to take that policy initiative, you put yourself at great risk, because one violation of a particularly high-risk offender who's on electronic monitoring could crash your whole system.
I just came back from New Zealand, where we were looking at correctional policy issues, and indeed that happened. It wasn't particularly an electronic monitoring case, but one serious mistake by a high-risk offender in the community almost abolished the probation department in that country.
So if you want to take that high-risk monitoring procedure in the community, then you're going to have to have tremendous political support to do so.
In the U.S.A., the organization known as ICE—an interesting acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement—sees to it that any immigration violators, people who try to get into the country several times, people who have committed serious crimes, are immediately sent to a prison. In fact, the Bureau of Prisons has many immigration cases right now.
What happens is that with families or individuals who are low risk, it seems they're the ones who get on electronic monitoring within the U.S. context.
Here's a final point, and it's controversial. It's an American argument. It has been argued by some criminologists in the U.S. that policies like electronic monitoring and a more Orwellian approach to dealing with individuals have been less about the protection of the public and more to do with economic interests. That's a general, broad perspective. It's controversial.
We have seen in the United States the building of many prisons in rural areas to spur economies. We see the privatization of corrections to be increased substantially more, particularly in the U.S. And with the Supreme Court decision that corporations now are individuals, we can see corporations making huge donations to interested political parties to support commercial interests. That is an interesting wedge that sometimes comes into the system, and that is a peculiarly American sort of situation, but it could apply to some other jurisdictions.
Thank you.
