Thank you very much.
I'm with the John Howard Society of Canada, which is a community-based charity whose mission is to support effective, just, and humane responses to the causes and consequences of crime. The society has more than 60 front-line officers across the country offering many programs to support the reintegration of offenders and to prevent crime. The objective of our work is to make communities safer.
I want to thank you very much for the kind invitation to speak to you about Bill C-479, which proposes amendments to the Corrections and Conditional Release Act affecting the role of victims at parole hearings and lengthening the time between parole hearings in certain cases. The stated intention of the bill is to bring fairness to the victims of violent offenders.
I think we all share an interest in supporting victims with adequate programs and services and with information about the criminal justice system. I'm sure that information about the paroling system can be greatly enhanced. More challenging is finding agreement on the appropriate role of the victim in the criminal justice system to ensure the fundamental principles of justice are maintained and fairness is upheld for all.
The John Howard Society of Canada looks forward to the government's announced victims bill of rights, which will hopefully provide clarity on some of these important issues. Bill C-479 is being considered before the government has revealed its comprehensive strategy for victims in the criminal justice system. If passed in its current form, the likely consequences of this bill raise two categories of concern: first, its practical implications for the effectiveness of safe, graduated release generally and victim prevention; and second, its implications for the theoretical foundations of criminal law and corrections, particularly in the proposed role of the victim in the parole hearing.
I'll deal with the practical effectiveness issues first.
The research is clear, and I agree with Steve on this, that supervised and supported graduated release of prisoners back into a community promotes community safety by reducing recidivism. If prisoners are unmotivated to participate in rehabilitation programs and be guided on parole at the end of their sentences, they may well return to our neighbourhoods lacking the skills and guidance needed to live crime-free lives. Eroding supervised and supported graduated release of prisoners imperils community safety and increases the number of victims in our society.
This bill is very sweeping in its effect. It proposes lengthening the time between parole hearings for those prisoners who have committed offences listed on schedule I of the act, which includes 76 current offences and 18 historical offences, not all of which are violent or cause serious physical harm to offenders.
Right now there are 11,286 federal offenders that are covered by schedule I. These aren't a few murderers or dangerous murderers. This is a whole whack of federal offenders who are covered by these provisions.
If these prisoners are denied parole at a hearing, they would only be entitled to another hearing within five years. But since most federal prisoners are serving sentences of less than five years, this would mean just one chance at parole for them. The majority of prisoners would thus not be released through the parole's graduated, supervised, and supported release process, but instead would be abruptly dumped back into the community at statutory release or at warrant expiry.
While it may be comforting to believe that the longer you keep prisoners in custody the safer communities are, this is simply not true. Those released at the end of their sentences have not prepared themselves with skills and are not being supported and supervised through community corrections. Bill C-479 would put in place a system where more prisoners would be denied the benefits of graduated release and that would reduce the chances of those returning to the communities remaining crime-free. This would compound an already growing problem in the corrections system. Just to let you know, more than half of offenders now see their first release at statutory release or warrant expiry, not through the benefits of the paroling system, and this will exacerbate this problem.
The second set of concerns posed by Bill C-479 deals with the appropriate role of the victim at the parole hearings, consistent with fundamental principles of justice. Essentially, a parole hearing is to assess whether a prisoner has made progress on his or her correctional plan, what level of risk might be posed if the sentence were managed in the community, and whether conditions could be imposed that would make the risk manageable in the community. It is not to revisit the punishment, which has been imposed by the court through the sentencing process, where victims have already had an opportunity to provide a victim impact statement.
Input from a victim at a parole hearing would need to be relevant to the decision before the quasi-judicial body. But since the parole hearing is to assess progress on the prisoner's correctional plan and to assess risk management issues in the community, a statement by the victim, who may not have knowledge of the prisoner's progress on the correctional plan and may have limited expertise on community risk management, hardly seems appropriate at this stage.
There is, of course, a legitimate role for victim statements relating to possible conditions on release, but this should be clearly detailed and set out in the bill. If the victim has received threats directly or indirectly from the prisoner or if the prisoner will be returning to the same family or the same community as the victim, conditions like no contact orders could be included as conditions of parole and this seems entirely legitimate.
More challenging is the notion that the prisoner's entitlement to regular reviews once he or she is eligible for parole should be reduced in order to provide fairness for victims. This interest of victims not to have to attend regular parole hearings compromises the prisoner's right to have a level of reduced liberty in the management of his or her sentence reviewed consistently with fundamental principles of justice.
The legitimacy of trading liberty rights and protections based on fundamental principles of justice with victims' interests will no doubt be discussed more fully when the government releases its victims bill of rights.
The general reconstruction of crime, bail, punishment, and parole as a battle of criminals' rights against victims' rights is part of a wider transformation of rights-thinking in Canada, which some of us consider to be an unfortunate direction.
Where before rights were understood as protections of the individual dignity of all humans, even criminals against the state, now they are increasingly presented as weapons employed by one group against the other with the state choosing the victor. We must ensure that even in this new rights ideology, convicted criminals are still treated with the humane respect required by the long traditions of the common law.
In conclusion, the John Howard Society of Canada urges you to postpone your consideration of private member's Bill C-479 until after the government has introduced its own bill, which is expected to deal more comprehensively with the rights of victims in the criminal justice system. The potential for overlap and inconsistency of proceeding first with this bill is strong.
The John Howard Society of Canada also urges you to consider a more fundamental review of the current effectiveness of the current paroling system in Canada. Promoting rehabilitation and a successful reintegration through an effective system of graduated release is a good way to reduce future victimization.
Implementing this bill with its intended denial of many prisoners to a second parole review before statutory release and warrant expiry will effectively gut the existing parole system. The system of one shot parole for the majority of federal offenders will be ineffective in meeting the statutory goals of graduated release.
While we support programs, services, information, and define participation of victims in the criminal justice and corrections systems, Bill C-479 will undermine a graduated release system intended to promote community safety and reduce victimization generally. This bill is certainly not fair to future victims.
Thank you very much.