Public Safety Committee on Feb. 14th, 2012

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses for your attendance and for your thoughts on this important topic.

You all have concerns about this electronic monitoring. It's going to appear that I'm in favour of electronic monitoring, and that's not true, because I haven't made up my mind yet, but just so that we can have a fulsome debate on the topic, I'm going to challenge some of your commentary.

I'm going to start with your last comment, Dr. Gendreau, on economic interests. I can't think of any other philosophical reason why we would go down that road other than to save money.

You all talked about the expense of this. I made notes, and you indicated three to five times more costly.

I think, Ms. Latimer, you said more expensive, and, Mr. Hutton, you said it would be $800,000 to monitor 46 offenders. More expensive compared to what? I'm assuming you mean more expensive compared to community supervision without electronic monitoring. You can't mean versus incarceration, which in a medium security institution in Canada runs close to $100,000 and in maximum security it's well north of that.

Start in any order you like.

[John Hutton]

Perhaps I may have been speaking fairly quickly. I'm a little nervous. I did make this point, but perhaps I made it too quickly. What I wanted to have the committee consider is that when you're comparing costs you're not comparing the cost just with, say, incarceration—I think you're right in terms of that—but with the cost of other forms of supervision. Certainly in terms of 48 people in the community, assuming a salary of around $50,000 or $60,000 a year, plus benefits, a parole officer could look after a caseload of 48 without much difficulty. That would be about a $75,000 cost compared to the $850,000. You could probably hire a parole officer to supervise 48 people for about a tenth of that or even less.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Comparing it to non-electronic monitoring community supervision.

[John Hutton]

That's correct.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Dr. Gendreau, the same?

[Dr. Paul Gendreau]

Electronic monitoring is cheaper than incarceration—

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you. That's what I wanted to clarify, because you also talked about—

[Dr. Paul Gendreau]

—but it's not cheaper than community supervision. If you were to put high-risk offenders on electronic monitoring in the community, yes, you would be saving dollars. Then you would have to have a system that would be able to stand up to the public pressure when there's a serious incident with a high-risk offender.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Fair enough.

Ms. Latimer, you indicated that you would prefer to see programs with a higher success rate and that are more humane.... This implies somewhat explicitly that you believe electronic monitoring is not humane. I was wondering if you could explain to me why you feel that is the situation.

[Catherine Latimer]

Many people who have been in conflict with the law have a myriad of problems, whether it's addiction, whether it's mental health, whether it's family issues. There are all kinds of problems. What we would consider to be a more humane approach is to actually have person-to-person contact with these people in an effort to help them overcome their problems and thereby have a more successful reintegration.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Sure. Reintegration requires social and human contact. I get that.

In terms of the limitations of electronic monitoring—and as I said, this is only our second meeting, but I think we understand this much—it only helps Corrections, or whoever is monitoring, pinpoint the location of the offender. That's all it does, and sometimes not even that. Sometimes the radio ones will only tell you that the individual has left a perimeter. They don't even tell you where he is, but you just know he's not where he's supposed to be. I appreciate the limitations that it's only a location-type device for people who are either on house arrest or are perhaps awaiting trial, or they're on some sort of interim judicial release.

For an individual who was sentenced with some sort of conditional sentencing, if electronic monitoring were combined with the types of programs that you contemplate in terms of rehabilitation and reintegration, would that alleviate some of your concerns regarding the lack of humanity?

[Catherine Latimer]

It would alleviate some of my concerns. But going back to John's point, does human contact alone have equal or better results than electronic monitoring plus human contact? If so, you could save a lot of money if you just went with human contact monitoring.

If you need to buttress electronic monitoring with services in the community, and the services in the community have a pretty good success rate in dealing with people, why complicate it with additional costs? That's my point.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

I understand the concept of widening the net. Today, and always, your society advocates for more effective and fair dispositions for offenders in the system. I'm assuming by that you mean less custodial sentences in the first place, as opposed to custodial sentences that are somehow transformed into community sentences at some point. You would like to see less custodial sentences in the first place. Philosophically that's what—

[Catherine Latimer]

We're not an abolitionist organization. We agree that at certain points custodial sentences are necessary for certain offenders. If your objective is protecting the public over the long run, you're better off with more community-based sentences as a way of holding people accountable. The recidivism rates are better if you have community-based sentences, as opposed to custodial sentences.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

That may or may not be true. Some would argue that the recidivism rates are higher among those who are serving custodial sentences because those persons are less subject to rehabilitation.

[Catherine Latimer]

Are you saying it's a chicken and egg sort of thing?

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

That person is a worse person, if I can use a colloquialism.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Rathgeber. We're out of time.

We'll go to Mr. Sandhu.

If you want to bring some of Mr. Rathgeber's answer in here, you're welcome to.

Go ahead, Mr. Sandhu.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Thanks to the witnesses for coming here today. Your input is very much appreciated.

I want to congratulate Professor Gendreau for being a recipient of the Order of Canada. That's a great honour, and we are pleased to have you here.

Professor Gendreau, you've had a chance to look at the pilot program that was offered in 2008. Can you tell us about the successes of that program, if any?

[Dr. Paul Gendreau]

Is this the one that Dr. Bonta referred to?

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

That's correct. It's the 2008 pilot project that was done in Ontario. You have been quoted by CBC on that.

[Dr. Paul Gendreau]

I have just taken a look at the paper trail for that program. It was embarrassing as a Canadian citizen to see the mark-up in that program from a technical standpoint and other regards. I thought we had surely developed electronic monitoring long enough to put a program in place that worked more effectively than that, just from a technical standpoint.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

You were quoted in the CBC report as stating that the cost was too much for this sort of program.

[Dr. Paul Gendreau]

Colleagues alluded to it. Yes, it was an enormous cost.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

I'll come back to my friends from the John Howard Society.

We heard from witnesses at the last meeting that you need an integrated approach to reforming inmates, and electronic monitoring alone will not correct their behaviour. Can you talk about that a little more, Ms. Latimer?