Public Safety Committee on Feb. 14th, 2012

[Anthony Ashley]

We've only looked at catalogues, if you will. We haven't physically sited the devices. We haven't really done any real analysis on them. I think Pierre has looked at them in a bit more detail than I have.

Pierre, would you like to comment?

[Pierre Meunier]

I've looked at the bracelet technology for the most part.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Three minutes.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Pierre, you've looked at the bracelets. Because we don't know the operational side of it, and these are generic devices, do you think with operational leads for corrections we would need major modifications to these devices?

[Pierre Meunier]

I think they were designed for correctional purposes. I think that what is off the shelf is probably what....

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

So we wouldn't need any modifications for the bracelets you've looked at?

[Pierre Meunier]

I can't think of anything right off the bat.

[Anthony Ashley]

I think it gets back to the performance you require. Companies make these devices. They make them according to a specification. Frankly, I don't know where they get that specification from. We've talked about how they work, under ideal conditions maybe to meet that specification, and under less than ideal conditions they probably don't meet the specification.

When you talk about improvements, it would seem clear from what we've heard that some people think these things don't work as well as they might. So improvements might be necessary. Again, that's all very tightly linked into the environment you're trying to operate them in and the operational requirement. So you really need to do that analysis to determine where the shortfall is, if there is one in terms of the technical capability of the device.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

That's my last minute, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Go ahead, Madam Morin.

[Marie-Claude Morin, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

I was told that, according to certain studies, these devices cannot be destroyed or tampered with. Could you provide us with more details on that, please?

[Anthony Ashley]

Any physical device can be subject to physical abuse. These things aren't made out of titanium. I think they're largely made out of reinforced plastic. There's waterproofing; there's the whole issue of whether you can tamper with them, whether you can use electronic devices to interfere with the radio signals. All of those things are possible to some degree. It's a question of to what degree you want to make these things tamper-proof or make them hard enough, if you will, that they don't interfere with the individual and yet can't be cut off.

These are all trade-offs in the design of the device. You need to say that you need the device to be able to do this, and it can't be cut off with this type of instrument. It needs to be able to withstand an electric field from at least two feet away.

These are the sorts of technical specifications we talk about.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

All right.

I have a couple of quick questions here.

In some respects, I don't apologize, but I feel bad that you have not been given a direct mandate to research this. It's a very broad scope that you've looked at.

If a government was looking at some type of electronic monitoring...and according to our study here, our motion is:

That the Committee undertake a study, for no less than eight meetings, of the use of electronic monitoring in both a corrections and conditional release setting, as well as an immigration enforcement setting, with a view to determining effectiveness, cost efficiency, and implementation readiness.

If a government were to say that the provinces are doing this, that we want to better understand what's out there, would you be the only agency we would go to?

Our science and technology department—that may not have the same type of science. Because of your involvement with the Department of Defence, this is the type of thing that you may use in that department.

[Anthony Ashley]

Certainly, I think you'll find in the federal government that the Department of National Defence has some of the best support for this type of activity, but other people may well be able to provide input as well.

In fact, if we were tasked to do something, one of the first things would be to find out who all those individuals were and bring together a team. It doesn't have to be a team from inside DND; we're willing to work with others to find the best people who know the most.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

If the government decided, or if Corrections Canada decided, to implement some type of monitoring system for some low-risk offenders, and if part of this motion of our study deals with implementation readiness, what's out there now?

As you went through the Sears catalogue of Maxwell Smart-type merchandise, is it ready to—can you just order them and there you have them?

[Anthony Ashley]

We can't tell you that right now.

That's one of the things.... Again, from our perspective, the way we do our work, we need—to belabour the point again—to interact with the operators, the communities that want to use these things, and they have to tell us what the constraints are on using them.

We would then translate that into these technical specifications and see if we can find something that meets those specifications. Some of the current products may or may not meet those specifications.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Good. Thank you very much for appearing before our committee today.

We are going to adjourn for a couple of moments. We will then invite our next guests to come to the table for their comments.

We'll suspend for one or two minutes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

In our second hour today, we're hearing from three witnesses.

I'll just say that very seldom do we ever have two presentations from the same agency or from the same group, but I guess we'll allow that today. We have, from the John Howard Society of Manitoba, Mr. John Hutton, the executive director. And our committee also welcomes back Catherine Latimer, the executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada.

Appearing as an individual, we have Paul Gendreau, professor emeritus of the University of New Brunswick. Professor Gendreau is a visiting scholar from the University of North Carolina. In 2007 he was appointed as an officer of the Order of Canada, and he has published extensively on what works in the assessment and treatment of offenders and the evaluation of offender treatment programs.

I invite each of you to make an opening statement before we proceed to questions from our committee members.

Do you each have a presentation?

Perhaps I'll begin with you, Ms. Latimer, and then we'll move to Mr. Hutton and then down to Mr. Gendreau.

[Catherine Latimer, Executive Director, John Howard Society of Canada]

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.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Ms. Latimer.

Now to Mr. Hutton, please.

[John Hutton, Executive Director, John Howard Society of Manitoba, Inc.]

Thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to appear in front of you today.

I think I have a slightly different experience, and I hope you don't mind having both of us here. The John Howard Society of Manitoba runs two programs that monitor offenders and ex-offenders in the community, and I wanted to draw on some of that experience.

I have looked at the minutes of your last meeting and some of the reports, and you have had a lot of information about the effectiveness or the lack of effectiveness of electronic monitoring. I wanted to do something a little different today. Rather than look solely at the effectiveness of electronic monitoring, I would also like to address the benefits of human monitoring and why I would not like to see it replaced with some kind of radio or GPS device on its own.

I do have three quick concerns with regard to electronic monitoring. The first is that on its own it does not reduce recidivism or even prevent someone from committing a crime. This can be seen from the results of a pilot project undertaken in Manitoba in 2008 that was focused on youth who were considered high-risk car thieves. Upon review, it was found that while six youths successfully completed their term of supervision, seven more removed the device, another tried to cut it off but failed, and yet another stole a car while fitted with a monitor. I have sent a copy of the media release along with my statement to the clerk so you can see it for more detail. This was an example that showed that the monitors on their own did not prevent the youth from getting into more trouble or even stealing more cars.

Secondly, electronic monitoring is very expensive. I'm aware of a pilot project in Ontario launched in 2008. It cost over $850,000 to track just 46 parolees, all of whom were volunteers, suggesting that they were not at high risk to reoffend or they likely wouldn't have volunteered to wear the monitor. One parole officer could have provided human supervision for the same number of people in the community for one-tenth of the cost.

When evaluating electronic monitoring, the comparison should be not with incarceration but with the other forms of community-based monitoring.

I'm going to just skip over, I think, more to the point that the two presenters who spoke on the 9th stressed—that electronic monitoring would not be successful as a stand-alone approach, but should be combined with other kinds of programming and intervention. From my own experience at John Howard Society of Manitoba, I would take this conclusion one step further: interventions can succeed on their own without electronic monitoring at all.

The John Howard Society of Manitoba operates two programs that monitor and supervise clients. The first is a community-based alternative sentencing program, which has been evaluated quite positively by one of your other presenters, James Bonta, and which is known as the restorative resolutions program. Clients in this program have all pleaded guilty and are facing a jail sentence. They could be at low, medium, or high risk to reoffend. They could be a first-time offender or someone with a lengthy record, but in each case the client is prepared to take responsibility for his or for her actions and wants to repair the harm they have done in some way. The client works with the staff member in preparing a sentencing plan, and if approved by the court, the client carries out the plan while living in the community under the supervision of this office.

Our office supervises these individuals. They come in and meet once a week for a sit-down meeting for at least the first three months with that staff. There are phone calls, there are checks on curfews, checks on employment, and if a client is seen as failing to comply, they can be breached, and the program does breach clients if it has to.

On the other hand, we have a 90% completion rate, and the recidivism rate for this program over three years, which is quite good, is only 22%. That's half of what would happen when looking at people serving custodial sentences for similar types of crime. So there is a very low rate of recidivism—and very successful in terms of that—and we use no electronic monitoring.

Second, we just started operating a bail supervision and support program. It hasn't been evaluated, so I don't have the same kinds of statistics in terms of recidivism, but it is targeted at medium- and high-risk clients who would not otherwise be granted bail. This is funded by Manitoba Justice. Their challenge to us was that we get the guys out who would not otherwise get out and they would consider funding this program.

Something similar we do is a plan that assesses the risk factors of the individuals. If bail is granted, the individuals come into our supervision and care. They may live in a residence we have in our building. They're under our supervision and our support. Curfews and employment checks are made. Our first client has successfully completed the program, which just started in November, without reoffending. He attended his court date, as he should.

In neither of these programs do we use any kind of electronic monitoring. I would suggest that some of the strength of this program is the contact between the staff and the client. We establish some trust and a bit of a relationship, even with things as mundane as a phone call every night to verify the curfew and to make sure that the person is where he is supposed to be. We can verify where someone is, because we only phone land lines, so we know that the person is at the other end of the phone. We can also check in and see how he is doing. If somebody has a problem—maybe he's having trouble with an addiction—we can deal with it right away.

I would just let you contemplate that for many of the uses of electronic monitoring, it may be possible to monitor individuals in the community even more cheaply and more efficiently with human monitoring or those kinds of supports. If electronic monitoring is not seen as being particularly successful without those supports, then at the very least you would consider doing it together with them. But why not consider perhaps the possibility that it might be more efficient to put more resources into monitoring programs that involve reporting to a trained individual who is both supervising and supporting the individual while he is out in the community?

In conclusion, I wanted to give the example of the two programs, noting that we work with medium- and high-risk offenders. With the program that has been evaluated already, we've had a very good recidivism rate. That's where I wanted to take the presentation. What I wanted to leave with the committee this afternoon is the idea that perhaps the alternative is not electronic monitoring but is some other kind of monitoring that could be equally, if not more, effective for less money.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Hutton.

Now we'll move to Mr. Gendreau.

[Dr. Paul Gendreau, Professor Emeritus, University of New Brunswick, Visiting Scholar, University of North Carolina, As an Individual]

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.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Gendreau. Indeed, thank you to all for your comments.

We'll move into the first round of questioning, and we'll go to Mr. Rathgeber, please, for seven minutes.