Public Safety Committee on Feb. 16th, 2012

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Good afternoon, everyone. This is the 25th meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. It is Thursday, February 16, 2012. Today we are continuing our study on 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.

In our first hour we welcome back to our committee the Commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada, Mr. Don Head.

Again, we want to thank you for appearing before our committee and, I would say, for always being willing to come to our committee. You have appeared on other studies numerous times and we are very thankful for that.

I understand that you have an opening statement. I think it has been circulated to each of us. We look forward to your comments and then to the questions that can arise from them.

[Don Head, Commissioner, Correctional Service of Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to discuss the Correctional Service of Canada's experience with the use of electronic monitoring, or EM, as we refer to it.

In a correctional setting, EM is a tool used by parole officers to support the supervision of federal offenders released to the community. Today I'd like to provide you with an overview of the electronic monitoring pilot project we recently conducted in the Ontario region. I would then like to address the issues of cost efficiency, program effectiveness, and possible implementation of electronic monitoring, as identified earlier by the committee.

The goal of the electronic monitoring amendments in Bill C-10 is intended to help our parole supervision staff monitor an offender's compliance with a condition of a temporary absence, work release, parole, statutory release, or long-term supervision order. These are conditions that are imposed to restrict an offender's access to a person or a geographical area or that require them to remain in a certain geographical area.

In short, the purpose of electronic monitoring is to equip our staff with a new set of tools to help them with the close supervision of offenders and oversee offenders' safe transition into the community. It strengthens our efforts to promote offender accountability while these individuals are residing in the community and gives us additional information for our ongoing assessment of risk to ensure we are protecting the public.

As I mentioned, the Correctional Service of Canada recently conducted an electronic monitoring pilot project in the Ontario region to evaluate the effectiveness and the feasibility of EM as a supervision tool. The application and the removal of the monitoring devices were performed by federal parole officers. Offenders wore an ankle bracelet with a GPS receiver that reported its position to a monitoring network that was operated by Correctional Service of Canada staff at our national monitoring centre in Ottawa. The centre provided monitoring services seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Geographical conditions, such as staying away from a certain location, have historically proven difficult for parole officers to monitor. Electronic monitoring has helped to close this gap. By identifying their location, parole officers could assess near real-time information on whether offenders were abiding by geographical conditions imposed on their release.

Since the pilot, CSC has had an opportunity to reflect on the experience, analyze the results, and prepare for the possibility of a national implementation. CSC is currently looking at a procurement process for electronic monitoring equipment that will allow us to utilize the latest available EM systems and technologies.

Mr. Chair, I'd now like to address the issues of the cost efficiency and the effectiveness of EM.

The average daily cost for incarcerating an offender is $312, while the cost of maintaining an offender under supervision in the community is roughly $81 per day. For offenders residing at a community residential facility operated by non-government organizations under contract with CSC, it is approximately $100 per day. For the higher-need cases residing in a community correctional centre operated directly by CSC, it is about $184 per day.

Although electronic monitoring will never replace the direct supervision of offenders by parole supervision staff in our communities, an electronic monitoring device is estimated to cost approximately $15 per day, per unit, depending on the technology.

CSC implemented the electronic monitoring pilot project with the goal of evaluating the effectiveness and feasibility of EM as a supervision tool. An evaluation was completed and published in December 2009. It was determined that all electronic monitoring pilot objectives were successfully met. Further, CSC staff reported that electronic monitoring filled an important gap with respect to managing release conditions, and that the electronic monitoring and response protocols were appropriate.

It should also be noted that, during the pilot, CSC staff embraced EM and effectively integrated the technology into existing supervision practices.

As Bill C-10 is working its way through the parliamentary process, CSC is reviewing the overall results of the EM pilot and preparing for the possible implementation of a national EM service. Should the amendments to the Corrections and Conditional Release Act outlined in Bill C-10 related to electronic monitoring become law, I'm confident that CSC is well positioned to expand electronic monitoring services across the country.

In this regard, CSC would have in place the tools necessary to implement electronic monitoring. These would include policies, operational guidelines, and training.

Mr. Chair, the safe transition of eligible offenders to the community is of the highest priority to the Correctional Service of Canada. The organization routinely seeks out, examines, and evaluates new measures to enhance public safety.

The electronic monitoring service is one example of how CSC is continually looking for ways to improve its public safety results by ensuring that offenders undergo a gradual, structured, and supervised release. The electronic monitoring service will never be used as a stand-alone measure but will be integrated into our other effective correctional programs offered in the community.

I've had experience with electronic monitoring over the course of my correctional career, first while serving as the superintendent of the Whitehorse Correctional Centre in the Yukon and then as the assistant deputy minister responsible for correctional services and probation in the province of Saskatchewan. In these cases, the tools and technology were different, the decision-making process about their use was different, and the responses to alarms were different. However, the one thing that was common was that it was a tool that assisted correctional and probation staff in their supervision and management of offenders in the community.

Let's be clear: the intent of electronic monitoring will not by itself lead to reductions in recidivism. However, equipping staff with the proper tools to assist them with their supervision responsibilities will help with the safe transition of eligible offenders into the community, and this will ultimately contribute to strengthening public safety.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I welcome any questions you may have of me at this time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you again for your statement.

We'll now move to the government side for seven minutes.

Mr. Leef, please.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

Thank you very much.

Thank you again, Mr. Head, for being so willing to attend committees, oftentimes at short notice. You've done so once again, and we greatly appreciate it.

In your statement you talked a bit about geographical conditions in which electronic monitoring has helped. Could you, from the program evaluation, give us any indication of issues or challenges that you may have observed or have read about in that report concerning GPS drift or false alarms?

[Don Head]

Thank you. That's a very good question.

One thing we learned from the pilot was the limitations on the equipment. Learning that allowed us to modify our procedures, our policies, and our protocols. We also learned from it that although there is a drift factor, there is sometimes, even taking that into account, good reason to engage an offender in questions as to why they were getting close to an area for which they may have had conditions requiring them to stay away.

To give you an example, sex offenders out in the community often have conditions that restrict them from places where young children meet, such as playgrounds, swimming pools, or schoolyards. Even though there may be some drift, if they're getting close to those zones and the drift is showing that they're in the zone, whether or not the drift was accurate we still have questions as to why they were coming close to an area such as that. It allows the parole officer to engage the offender in the kinds of discussions that are needed to supervise some of the conditions that are placed on offenders.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

We heard testimony—and I'm not saying that it was specific to the Ontario experience—that there were some cases in which the GPS technology didn't work and you had an offender showing as being 60 miles in one direction on the GPS who was actually 60 miles in the other direction.

Are you aware of anything in the Ontario study like that?

[Don Head]

No, I'm not—nothing to that extent.

When we worked through this pilot project, we worked with the Province of Nova Scotia and were able to learn from some of their early experience. When they had people down near the waterfront and the GPS was showing them in the middle of the Halifax harbour, unless they were fishing they knew there was some issue there. They were able to address those kinds of things. But these weren't 60-mile kinds of problems.

Some of the early technology that I experienced previously in other jurisdictions had significant drift problems, but with some of the newer technology there's still drift. With any GPS tool that you can buy on the street right now, you're never pinpointed to one-foot accuracy anyway; that kind of technology is usually reserved for the military. But you get a level of accuracy that allows you, in this case, to do the kinds of supervision that you would expect from us of offenders in the community.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

In part of your evaluation, you said the objectives were successfully met. Maybe I'll ask you a bit about what some of the objectives were.

I'm wondering if part of the evaluation process was finding out what reaction of the offenders was. Maybe you could give us a general sense of how it was received by the people who were part of that program.

[Don Head]

As to the objectives we were trying to achieve, we did not go into this with any lofty goal of trying to reduce recidivism. It was a pilot for us, done to test some types of equipment. We were trying to get a sense of the equipment's capacities and limitations, to see what we needed to develop in the way of practices, protocols, policies, and training. We also wanted to find out whether using this kind of technology would assist a parole officer in managing offenders.

There were two reactions found in the evaluation. One was the reaction from the parole supervision staff. They saw this as a positive tool to help them with their work. We knew that in Canada and the U.S. there had been some indications that the probation staff were spending more time monitoring the alarms than engaging offenders. But we had the monitoring done in the national monitoring centre, so the information was fed to the parole officers, who were able to balance the informational input with the management of offenders. This way we didn't have our probation staff tied up watching an alarm screen. We got very positive feedback from the staff.

As for the offenders that were surveyed, this pilot was very small. Its purpose was to test the equipment and develop practices and procedures. But the feedback from the offenders was that wearing of the bracelet did not cause them to change their behaviour, and we saw that as positive.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

We heard about the level of offender this is being used on. In this study was it low-risk, medium-risk, or high-risk offenders?

[Don Head]

These were mostly low-risk offenders and individuals who agreed to wear the bracelet. We were not striving for reductions in recidivism rates. We were working toward understanding the equipment and how we could best use it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

Mr. Sandhu.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Commissioner Head, for being here again today. I know that we last talked just before December.

I'm looking at a CBC report published back in July 2010. They looked at the pilot program and some of the summaries of it. The CBC report says that the internal review of the program found that the pilot project was “plagued with technical malfunctions” of the anklet's global positioning system and “showed little proof of the device's effectiveness”.

Is that true? Was that the result of the pilot project?

[Don Head]

The report indicated that there were some deficiencies but that through amendments to practices and procedures we could address these deficiencies.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

So the pilot project was plagued with technical malfunctions, and it showed that the devices weren't effective.

[Don Head]

No, no. Again, we.... It depends on what was being defined by “effectiveness”. Again, the newspaper articles take only the extracts of what they want to use.

In terms of what we had set out as the objectives for the pilot project, those objectives were met. They were to test the equipment, understand its capacity and limitations, and understand, from learning that, what we would have to put in place for practices and procedures—even response protocols and training—in order to use such a tool if the provisions in Bill C-10 pass.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

How many participants took part in this study?

[Don Head]

At any given time, I think we had between 46 and 50. It was between 40 and 50 on any given day.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

I have the report here. It says there were 46 participants. I'm going to read again from the report, which basically “acknowledged the project was too small to draw conclusions on the usefulness of the program...”. Is that from the pilot project review?

[Don Head]

Again, that reference is in relation to discussions about the effectiveness in relation to recidivism. We were not testing the equipment to gauge the level of impact on recidivism.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Okay.

To go back to the report, here are some of the examples of the actual electronic deficiencies that were detected. Would it be true that “there was only one valid electronic ankle alert out of 19 where a parolee had actually tampered with his ankle strap”?

[Don Head]

If you're reading from the report, that reflected the situation, yes.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Okay. So “[m]ost of the false alarms were due to equipment sensitivity and hardware or software issues”?

[Don Head]

Yes, and that's why we were doing the pilot: to understand the limitations.

[Jasbir Sandhu, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Okay. So “one-third, or six cases, were caused by accidental jarring at work or during activities”...?