Evidence of meeting #137 for Public Safety and National Security in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was actually.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Correctional Investigator of Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada
What was that?
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
Will it actually change or improve how inmates are treated, in your opinion?
Correctional Investigator of Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada
I mentioned the punishment side of things. As I said, that's only one side of the ledger.
Part of the problem is that in corrections, there are no incentives left for correctional officers and correction staff to leverage. There's no positive reinforcement. Inmate pay, for example, is a great incentive, yet inmate pay hasn't changed since 1981. It's extraordinary. As I'm talking to you guys, the base salary for an MP is $175,000; in 1981 it was $48,000. In corrections, we've created a system of deprivation, and there's no way of getting ahead if you want to. Now we have all these underground economies because there are insufficient resources. Food is a problem, and—
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
I have limited time. The chair always seems to pick on me for time.
Have you ever done any work with the needle exchange program? Do you think there should be parameters around this policy in the legislation?
Liberal
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
The minister brought it up in the House and at committee. It was specific to needle exchange with IV and EpiPens. He did. You can go back and look at the transcripts.
Liberal
Correctional Investigator of Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada
Corrections spends tens of millions of dollars on interdiction. They strongly believe—and this was since the Harper years—in zero tolerance towards drugs. The problem with that strategy is that it has failed. It failed in society and it's failing in jails.
How can I convince you that it fails? I would say that if you look at the urine analysis that is being done, there were about 19,000 done last year—
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
Just before my time is up, I would add that the correctional system is failing our inmates, because its purpose is to rehabilitate. Many of them end up there in the first place because of their addiction problems. Is that correct?
What you're really saying is that our system is failing the inmates. We're not rehabilitating anybody because they're still using the drugs that got them in there in the first place.
Correctional Investigator of Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada
If you look at positive urine analysis—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Mr. Zinger, I'm truly sorry. Mr. Motz has run over his time. I apologize.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
That's a rare confession on your part.
Mr. Spengemann has the last five minutes, please.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Thank you very much, Dr. Zinger and Madam Kingsley. Thank you for being back with us.
In the five minutes I have, I want to focus on the human element of corrections. I think it's pretty fair to say that our corrections system, in a large part, does not generate good mental health outcomes for the population of inmates, and also equally for our women and men who serve as correctional officers. You'll recall the report that this committee did on that question.
I'm wondering if you can briefly give the committee an appreciation of how much of an issue mental health is at the point of intake into the correctional system and also at the point of release, in terms of percentages. Maybe give a couple of qualitative comments as well, especially if there's a gender dimension to it.
Correctional Investigator of Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada
In terms of prevalence, I think the best data is that about 35% of men admitted into the system have a mental health issue that requires psychological or psychiatric services. For women, it's 50%. These are the numbers.
It is a growing concern. Of course, there are a disproportionate number of people who suffer from mental health issues in administrative segregation, or soon in SIUs in the future.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Is there any data at the point of release on how the inmate fares in terms of mental health when he or she is released back into Canadian society?
Correctional Investigator of Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada
I can tell you about correctional outcomes for those who are mentally ill. They are more likely to serve more time in jail. They are more likely to be segregated. They are more likely to be subject to the use of force. They are more likely to have their parole suspended or revoked. The correctional outcomes are poor for those who suffer from mental illness.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
I commend the bill for putting forward a vision of culture change in the correctional system.
The bill calls for an increase in staffing of mental health professionals. I wanted to ask you if you could give the committee your view of who the women and men would be who would deliver these services.
The question is focused on how much experience a mental health professional would have to have with the correctional system to be able to effectively interact with and serve inmates who suffer from mental health issues. In other words, could these be mental health practitioners who have had no previous contact with correctional services at all, or do they need to have some familiarity with exacerbating factors that may pop up within the system to be able to deliver services effectively?
If it's the latter, where do we find those people?
Correctional Investigator of Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada
In my annual report, I talk about a report that was done by John Bradford, who reviewed the regional treatment centre. There are five regional treatment centres, which are basically designated psychiatric hospitals within Correctional Service of Canada.
The report is actually quite damning. He says that the level of care that is being provided is, in terms of....There are seriously insufficient resources that do not compare well to community psychiatric hospitals. He talks about the lack of training. His ultimate recommendation is that the service should actually get rid of those regional treatment centres and build stand-alone hospitals, and they should be outsourced to experts in forensic psychiatry.
I would direct you to that report to get a better understanding.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Dr. Zinger, I want to circle back to the term “meaningful human contact”. It's UN language. It's a common denominator.
Is there value in this terminology, either through legislative interpretation, regulatory interpretation, or ultimately judicial interpretation? If so, can we use this term to take account particularly of vulnerable populations—in other words, a gender lens, a diversity lens, an indigenous lens, ethnic, religious backgrounds, disability? Can we get somewhere with this phrase “meaningful human contact”?
Correctional Investigator of Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada
That's probably part of the challenge of understanding this bill. It's not clear, because we don't know how this is going to unfold.
Segregation units, if this is where these SIUs are going to be located, are certainly not a therapeutic environment. The interaction would be through food slots. There are no common areas in most segregation areas, so it's not clear how this human contact will take place, because you'll have to actually physically take the inmates outside of those units in order to find appropriate program rooms or interview rooms.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Thank you again on behalf of the committee, Mr. Zinger and Ms. Kingsley. I appreciate your contribution to the study of this bill.
We will suspend for a few minutes while our next panel comes in.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
We will reconvene.
We have with us Senator Kim Pate. Welcome again to the committee.
We also have Cara Zwibel and Noa Mendelsohn Aviv from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. I don't know how you're going to split up your 10 minutes, but I'll leave that to you.
Colleagues, Ms. Mendelsohn Aviv needs to be out of here at 5:30 in order to catch a flight, so if you want to catch her with some questions, probably earlier would be better than later.
With that, I'll ask Senator Pate for her 10 minutes, and then swing over to the Civil Liberties Association.
Kim Pate Senator, Ontario, ISG
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all of the committee for inviting me to appear.
As someone who lives and has worked in this unceded Algonquin territory for now approximately 27 years, I want to say that the impact of colonization on our indigenous peoples is particularly acute when you have the privilege and responsibility, as I have for almost four decades now, of walking in to—but, most importantly, being able to walk out of—prisons for youth, prisons for men and, for 25 years before my appointment, prisons for women.
All that is to say that when the minister introduced Bill C-83, it was described as ending the practice of segregation by the Correctional Service of Canada and as the government's response to the recommendations of the jury regarding the homicide death of Ashley Smith. If in fact it were either or both of those, I would certainly be one of the most vocal supporters of the bill.
In fact, as we know, October 19 of this year marked the eleventh anniversary of the preventable death of Ashley Smith in the segregation unit at Grand Valley Institution for Women. Since that time, we have seen the implementation of very few of the recommendations put forth by the coroner's jury.
One of the things that is outlined in the bill and is certainly foreshadowed as though it were in response to the jury recommendations is the potential use of mental health advocates. In fact, what was being recommended by the jury were peer advocates and peer supports as well as mental health advocates, who are currently in place in the various prisons for women. The jury also recommended advocates to be available in some of the federal penitentiaries, particularly the regional psychiatric centre, which is dually designated as a psychiatric hospital and a federal penitentiary, but these have not in fact been used.
I'd be happy to talk more about why they have not been used. In part it's because of the process by which corrections implements the mental health legislation, invoking the mental health legislation for the purposes of forcible treatment when they wish to do so and then abandoning it before all the protective mechanisms, which include mental health advocates, kick in.
Therefore, the practice and procedure of the Correctional Service of Canada in this regard to date does not hold out great hope that a new process would be put in place just because of this bill, particularly in light of the fact that the bill also removes a number of the other procedural safeguards that currently exist for segregation.
I want to draw particular attention to the fact that prior to the bill being introduced and since the bill was introduced, going into federal penitentiaries both in my capacity as teaching a prison law course at Dalhousie University and in my capacity as a member of the human rights committee of the Senate, it is clear to me that what is likely to happen as a result of this bill, if it is passed as is, has already started to happen within the federal penitentiaries.
Certainly, we've seen this trend in the prisons for women for some time. All of the women who are classified as maximum security prisoners have been living in a state of segregation, because segregation is both a place called segregation and a status of separation. All federally sentenced women who are classified as maximum security have been living in these kinds of units since they were developed in the regional prisons across the country.
As I visited the last couple of penitentiaries when this bill was introduced, I was advising students on the sections that we were in. At one point, for instance, we entered the Nova Institution for Women, and I advised the students that we were in the segregation area. I was quickly corrected that it was no longer the segregation area; it was pod C of the intensive intervention unit. It was a very clear and very graphic example of how nothing has changed—merely the change of the name of the unit in that context.
In the men's prisons we saw the same thing, and similarly—unbeknownst to me before I started on the human rights committee review, because it had been some time since I was going regularly into the prisons for men—all the men's maximum security units and prisons are also now a series of segregated units.
That brings me to a point that has been raised in some previous testimony, which is that the majority of those in segregation are there voluntarily.
Some of you know that in fact there are very few members of Parliament, senators or judges who enter the penitentiary, despite their right of access according to section 72 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act. Well, for all of us who have entered and who have asked prisoners this precise question, for almost all of them, if they say that they are there “voluntarily”—and I would put that in quotation marks on purpose—it is because they are looking for a time out, for protection, or to be separated from the general population for some other reason. It is usually generated by the pre-existing conditions of confinement.
When we ask them if they would like to be in any other type of conditions, whether that would be in the private family visiting unit if they're looking for time to themselves or to have access to programs and services so as to have some time away from the very small, contained segregated units, in every instance prisoners have indicated that they would prefer that. Equally important is that when we've talked to staff, they have talked about the fact that increasingly people are segregated, and that is raising tensions in prisons and raising concerns.
The other piece I'm working on separately from the work of the human rights committee is in starting to go in and meet with the groups of men who have been gang-involved and who are the other rationale that is often given for segregating. There is a very good program in the Stony Mountain Institution. There is also a very good intervention being run by a man named Richard Sauvé, who is himself serving a life sentence. A number of senators and others are going into the prison in the coming weeks to actually meet with him and talk about the work they're doing to de-escalate situations and assist people, and in particular both African-Canadian and indigenous men who want to drop their colours so that they can actually start to desegregate, if you will, within the prison population.
There are a number of initiatives that have not actually been adequately canvassed, in my view, and it remains my view that in fact we could be looking at truly doing what this bill says it wishes to do. I for one would be happy to work with any and all of you on the committee, as well as with others, to ensure that the bill actually does that. My suggestion, actually, is that this be repealed and that we start from a new perspective and really try to do what is a very laudable intention brought forth by the Minister of Public Safety.
Finally, I would say a word about what you've already heard from Dr. Zinger, the correctional investigator, on the lack of accountability.
The very few procedural safeguards that exist now for administrative segregation will essentially be thrown out the window and the monitoring of it will largely rest on the Correctional Service of Canada. I would suggest respectfully that there is a very important role for this committee and possibly for the human rights committee or the legal committee of the Senate to jointly look at implementing a recommendation that this committee made around oversight. I would recommend that annual reviews, not just reviews every five years, be conducted in accordance with the recommendation you made earlier with respect to the review of prisons.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Thank you.
From the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, who's speaking first?
