Thank you very much. It's great to be back before the committee.
As you know, the John Howard Society of Canada is a community-based charity whose mission it is to support effective, just, and humane responses to the causes and consequences of crime. The society is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
We have more than 60 front-line offices across the country, many with programs and services to support the safe reintegration of offenders into our communities and to prevent crime. Our work helps to keep communities safe and to make them safer.
The John Howard Society is pleased that the committee is studying the issue of electronic monitoring in the corrections system. This concept dates back to the 1960s. There have been an awful lot of tests to bring it forward and to use it in the corrections system. We welcome an opportunity to look at the evidence for the effectiveness of those particular initiatives.
Essentially, electronic monitoring is often brought forward to try to reduce the prison population. The need for measures to reduce prison populations in Canada is great and growing. Despite a decade or more of falling crime rates, prison crowding has been reported as a problem in many provinces and territories, and this is likely to get worse with the expected influx of new people in custody following the enactment of Bill C-10.
Our contention is that there are more effective, fairer, and more humane ways to reduce the prison population than by using electronic monitoring, and there are many challenges with electronic monitoring.
I will not go into a great deal of detail because I know my colleague John will be raising some specific ones. I will just mention that one of the real risks with electronic monitoring is that they widen the net, and you end up imposing the electronic monitoring on the people who would have been in the community without any kind of monitoring in any event, and not really as an alternative to custody.
They are expensive. They may not be promoting pro-social conduct. The most the monitor will tell you is where the person is, not what the person is doing. Some are limited in their availability to more affluent detainees or offenders. These are the ones for which there is a precondition that you need to have access to a land line or phone, so if you're not in a residence that has that capability, you wouldn't be eligible for that type of electronic monitoring.
They may not reduce recidivism; the studies are inconclusive about whether the electronic monitoring achieves correctional objectives. And they may replace programs that have higher success rates and are more humane. Many offenders need not just monitoring but support and human connection if they are going to overcome their challenges and safely reintegrate back into their communities.
In conclusion, prison crowding in some Canadian custody and remand facilities has exceeded levels that were found by the Supreme Court of the United Sates to violate its constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment, which are similar to the Canadian charter protections. The need to find ways to reduce the numbers in custody is great. It might be worth testing models of electronic monitoring in evaluated pilots to assess whether they reduce prison populations and overcome the known shortcomings.
However, the John Howard Society of Canada believes that there are more effective, fairer, less expensive, and more humane ways to reduce the prison population than by using electronic monitoring. We would be pleased to work with parliamentarians and others on implementing immediate solutions to the prison crowding crisis.