As you know, an evaluation was done of the pilot project, which examined a number of areas in this regard. I understand the committee has made available this document, which in great detail looks at things such as continued relevancy and whether or not the electronic monitoring technology would be consistent with government priorities in our mission document. It was deemed to be relevant to the government priorities of public protection and community safety and also to our mission document in terms of what we were trying to achieve.
In the implementation area, a number of areas were highlighted as technological challenges—everything from the battery and the weightiness of the device itself to drift in signals through to tamper alerts.
One of the main purposes of the pilot was to test the technology, to gather some experience with each one of these models in terms of battery life, signal drift, the awkwardness of carrying the bracelets and devices—everything from that to the tamper alerts and the false alarms that were given.
In gaining experience with this equipment, our operational folks became very experienced in learning to deal with it. This was a huge benefit from the pilot: finding technological solutions and being able to address them. From what I understand, there is better technology and there are better ways of dealing with it. From staff and the reports they gave to me when we were doing the pilot, I understand that most of these problems can be overcome, notwithstanding that there will continue to be certain issues. In dealing with the technological issues that many would highlight in this regard, that was one of them.
Concerning the success of the pilot, it was declared in the evaluation to be inconclusive, which is consistent with other research findings. The cost savings and whatnot have yet to be demonstrated. It was a pilot, and it was limited to a select group of individuals. The full cost savings would not be realized until you went to a national implementation and a broader group of individuals, whereby those benefits could be realized. The potential would still be there. Basically, this is one aspect that has yet to be demonstrated, but cannot be demonstrated unless we go further with the whole exercise.
There are some other unintended benefits that we found. Some of the offenders reported that they got personal benefits, in the sense that it supported their own reintegration potential and aided them in that area. During the evaluation they were interviewed and questioned about some of that. So there were some potential benefits in that area.
If there's one strength I see, it's that it's a real adjunct to the supervision tool. If anything, it modernizes our ability to monitor the whereabouts of individuals who have certain conditions imposed upon them for geographic areas—inclusion or exclusion zones, or where they are supposed to be. It also affects the amount of effort we would devote to looking around to provide any kind of intervention, should an alert go off.
We also know that it enhances what we would consider “offender accountability”. In the case of many offenders, offender accountability involves their attitude, their behaviours, an insight into themselves. Being monitored throughout that period of time, these offenders became very acutely aware that they were supervised as to their whereabouts and became highly accountable for them.
It can also have other potentials in the long run. We know that it may reduce the length of residency conditions. It could be used to strengthen community strategies and be integrated with such other things as parole officer engagement with the offender. We also know that it could be incorporated into a strategy that has community-based programming and other supports and could support that as well. We know too that it can provide an alternative, potentially, to suspension or revocation, depending on the situation of the particular case.
So are there benefits on that side of the house? Certainly. From the technological side, in terms of the cost, we know that costs come down with the expansion and the widening of our ability to address different kinds of offenders.
The pilot was limited to a certain kind of offender, mostly those we would consider to be at the lower-risk end of the continuum for federal offenders under supervision. It has not been applied to the higher-risk clientele, among whom there might be more dividends yielded in the future. Only a future evaluation would yield some sort of clarity on that question.