Public Safety Committee on May 31st, 2016

[Howard Sapers]

Let me try to give you a real, practical example. The most senior person responsible for aboriginal programming right now is a director general. The director general reports eventually to a senior deputy commissioner, but that director general doesn't get to sit at the decision-making table.

We can think about any organization and all the competing interests that any senior executive has. In terms of getting the right airtime, the right emphasis, the right knowledge base, it's expecting a little too much of a director general to be able to tell senior executives what they should be doing and the decisions they should be taking. You need to put somebody at that table who is a peer, a colleague, someone who has rank and is able to lead change, drive change, and be accountable for change.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Ms. Damoff is next.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I want to thank you both for being with us here today. I only have seven minutes with you, so if I cut you off, it's not that I'm trying to be rude.

One of the things that I think often gets lost with the public is that we've increased our prison population, we've cut funding to correctional services, and we're not putting a focus on rehabilitation and reintegrating people. Not having the resources, releasing people who then become unlawfully at large, or a number of other things create a public safety risk. Eventually the majority of people get out of prison.

We talked a little about programming. I was recently in Winnipeg and was given a tour of the various facilities there. One of the things that came up was the community corrections liaison officers. Are you familiar with them?

They were actually police officers who served alongside parole officers. That was one of the cuts that was made. It seems it was a very small amount of money for a program that was working really well in the community and had parole working hand in hand with police.

There was nothing in your report about those types of programs. Is that within your mandate?

[Howard Sapers]

Thank you for the question.

We haven't talked a lot about community corrections. Community corrections is sort of the poor cousin of institutional corrections.

We did do a major investigation into the operation of community residential facilities or CCCs, community correction centres, operated by Correctional Service of Canada. What we found is that there's lots of innovation across the country and lots of people doing really good intervention at the community level, but they're sort of doing it on their own. Community corrections has not seen the level of investment that institutional corrections has. They've not seen the kind of innovations that we would have expected and have often had to share their proportion of the cuts. When things like deficit reduction action plans come along, they've had to share in their proportion of the cuts. Some of the victims of those cuts have been some of the liaison programs you're speaking of.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

To be honest, that was what bothered me the most in what is happening, because those people are in the communities. These are not people who are behind bars with corrections officers guarding the facility.

I did want to talk a little bit about segregation, because something that also came up at the facility I visited was that there are nine gangs there. One of the things the staff indicated to me is that sometimes they have difficulty and have to use.... I completely understand how administrative segregation is wrongly used for mental health issues, but in terms of having gangs and trying to keep people apart for very obvious reasons, when you have two competing gangs within a facility.... I didn't see a lot in your report about how those issues are being dealt with in our corrections facilities.

[Howard Sapers]

Gang management has been a long-standing issue for Correctional Service of Canada, as it is for other correctional services around the world. Keeping incompatibles apart, sometimes having to have units that are specifically designed for people who are involved in gang activity, having different management strategies in terms of when those people get yard access, get access to vocational training, get involved in programming, etc., are all part of the day-to-day work and operations of corrections.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

It seems that it's getting more challenging as—

[Howard Sapers]

There are some areas in the country where we're having more gang involvement and more gang issues than ever before. A lot of this, though, has to do with having the right mix of cell types, capacities, and security levels, etc., and good staff training, but segregation in and of itself is not the answer to any of that. Segregation in some ways makes that even more problematic, perhaps, with people relying on segregation as a way to avoid making other more difficult decisions about how you conduct that part of your business and your operations.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

The other thing they touched on was people who were remanded, and that's a real issue for them. The parole officer I spoke to had been actively working with the legal system to try to get people out of segregation, but their biggest issue was that people were remanded and they had to be there. Then it was a problem integrating those offenders into the general population.

[Howard Sapers]

Of course, Correctional Service of Canada deals with offenders sentenced to more than two years. I know that some offenders who are returned to penitentiary based on a new criminal charge may have remand status, and things get very complicated in terms of where they're housed and who houses them, but primarily, remand custody is the business of provincial and territorial corrections systems. That is tied into another very complex discussion about bail reform, how remand is used, and who it's used for.

I'm very lucky that's all outside of my mandate.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I want to touch on the programming, because I've had the issue come up that there's a disconnect between the programming that's offered for offenders in prison and what the Parole Board is looking for. Even if people want to qualify, they're not able to get the programming they require in order to get released. Could you speak to that a little bit?

[Howard Sapers]

Again, I know we're pressed for time, so I'll give you one little sliver of an answer.

When somebody appears before a sentencing judge and that judge says, “I'm going to send you to the penitentiary so you can get a program”, the judge is making an assumption that such a program exists and that if it exists it will be delivered, and if it exists and is being delivered, it will be delivered in the institution at the time that the inmate is there. Those are all assumptions that all too often don't come true, so—

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I'm going to cut you off for a second because I need to ask you one thing before my time is up.

Do you think that we need to be investing more in our Correctional Service to be able to deliver the type of programming that needs to be delivered there?

[Howard Sapers]

We need to ensure that the Correctional Service of Canada is spending the right amount of its budget on correctional interventions. We've observed in the past that there is a huge disconnect between the small proportion of the budget that's actually spent on programs versus the proportion of the budget that's spent on all kinds of other things.

There's just simply not enough capacity to meet the need. It may not require new funding, but it certainly will require reallocation of the existing budget.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Go ahead, Mr. Miller.

[Larry Miller, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

Thank you very much.

I want to continue, Mr. Sapers, on some questioning from Mr. Rayes. You mentioned a number of times that the law is in place, but it sounded as if—and I don't want to put words in your mouth—the law wasn't being adhered to in prisons.

Seeing as you kind of represent the prison side of it, my question logically is, why the hell aren't the rules being enforced?

[Howard Sapers]

Thank you. This is a role reversal you've just done on me, because that's the question I ask Correctional Service of Canada. I assume that we're still talking about segregation—

[Larry Miller, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

Well, it's everything.

[Howard Sapers]

In 2008 when we did our first report on Ashley Smith's death, we made specific recommendations about segregation, and a lot of it had to do with training and adhering to the framework. Things went really wrong with Ashley Smith. For example, the segregation review she was entitled to didn't take place simply because the Correctional Service misinterpreted its own policy about the segregation clock and how it was reset every time she was transferred.

In response to those recommendations, Correctional Service of Canada said they were going to make some changes, and they made a couple. Then there was the coroner's inquest, and they made 104 recommendations, many of them around segregation. In response to those recommendations, Correctional Service of Canada said they were going to make some changes, and they made a couple, but they talked about a commitment to look at a series of regulatory issues, administrative issues, training issues, and policy issues. That was in 2015. They promised a new segregation renewal strategy, and in their own words they said, because they had to bring practice closer to policy, that they were going to fine-tune things. They were going to look for some changes so that they could do that better.

Recently, Correctional Service of Canada updated its response on those recommendations in answer to a question from the Senate. They told the Senate that in 2015 they promised they were going to make some changes and they still promised to make those changes, so now we have, in 2016, an update, really, of what was first promised and discussed back in 2008.

I can't answer your question any more directly than that. The problems are well identified. Some of the solutions have been well identified. We haven't seen the action.

[Larry Miller, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

It's obvious somebody is dropping the ball, and I guess we've got to find out the reason.

I want to switch gears back to what Mr. Erskine-Smith talked about: injection sites. I've got a problem with this, and I'll tell you why. Injection sites are put in place to deal with a problem created by the real problem, and it goes back to drugs. I need you to make me understand in some way how illegal drugs are getting in there.

You talked about delivery people. Okay, I get that, but is there not a security system in place so that they're thoroughly inspected when they come in? Sure, I understand there are people out there who lie awake at night thinking of ways to screw the system, and the odd one may get through, but wouldn't you agree that if the proper security is in place, it should be a rarity rather than a regular occurrence?

I'll tell you what a lot of people think out there in the public: it's that the people in the prison system just turn a blind eye to it. I hope that isn't the case, but that's the appearance.

You will never convince me, I don't think, that the people who are employed in there—not all of the people, but some of the people employed in the prison system—are not part of the problem. They're allowing it to get through. Can you comment on that?

[Howard Sapers]

I think it is a very hard truth that, unfortunately, criminal conduct and corruption exist. Thank goodness it's not a huge part of the puzzle, but it's part of it.

As I said earlier, I'm not familiar with a drug-free prison anywhere. I'm not sure we'd want to operate such a thing—

[Larry Miller, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

I agree with you. I don't think there's a drug-free prison anywhere either, but let's not use that as an excuse or a crutch.

[Howard Sapers]

Oh no, and I agree, but I don't think we were discussing safe or supervised injection sites. I think we were talking about a prison-based needle exchange, which are really two very different things.

The reality is that you want to deal with people's addictions as health issues, and harm reduction is one of those strategies. This in no way is to facilitate or encourage contraband or illegal drug use; it is recognizing the health status of those individuals and trying to minimize harm.

Certainly we've seen a lot of increase in the efforts made by the Correctional Service of Canada in terms of detection and interdiction. Enforcement plays a role, but we're pretty much at the point of diminishing returns, again because it's very hard to know for every new million dollars we spend on interdiction and enforcement what that return will be in terms of finding more contraband drugs.

[Larry Miller, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

Okay. Switching from contraband to prescribed drugs in the prison for whatever disease, mental or physical, I take it that there's a lock-up system in there. In some of your earlier comments, it sounded as if, for some of those drugs, more than were prescribed were getting out to patients. Is that a problem? To what degree is it a problem?

[Howard Sapers]

Yes, the diversion of prescribed medication is an issue.

Again, it's an issue that the Correctional Service of Canada is well aware of, and they have increased efforts in terms of surveillance, monitoring, and substituting one form of drug for another. That includes, for example, substituting a liquid form of a medication for a pill form of a medication and watching somebody actually consume a liquid with it so that the pill can't be cheeked and then diverted.

I don't want to get into too many of the details of how people divert drugs. Some of them are unpleasant to discuss, and I don't want to give anybody any ideas either, but there are ways to divert those drugs.