Public Safety Committee on Nov. 7th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Unfortunately, you have 10 seconds.

[Audra Andrews]

Okay.

Rebuild community capacity and reinvest in community corrections.

[Zef Ordman]

Invest in front-line staff in the institutions.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. Motz.

Go ahead, Mr. Dubé, for seven minutes, please.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks for being here today.

You mentioned the Edmonton Institution. Given the situation that's been going on there for a number of months now, if not longer, I was wondering, both for yourselves and the folks you work with and represent, and also for corrections, what effect the quality of the working environment, or perhaps lack thereof, has on rehabilitation.

If I'm not mistaken, I remember one of the things that was said about the situation was that the fear that is created has an effect on the work that's being done and on the objectives that we all seek to achieve.

Could you elaborate a bit on what the impact actually is, and how we can potentially fix it?

[Zef Ordman]

The impact of the harassment, bullying, and high stress because of the work environment is outrageous, and Edmonton's not alone. It's across Canada. It's happening in B.C. It's happening in Ontario. It's happening in Quebec. It's been happening for decades. My opinion is that it's the tip of the iceberg. For what you see above the water, there's a huge mass below.

It affects the rehabilitation if you're being harassed by co-workers or dealing with dysfunctional inmates. On a regular basis, inmates would threaten to kill me. I'd even have them say, “I know where you live.” At a certain level, you put it to the back of your head, but no one who works in CSC is the same 20 years later. It might be similar with police officers.

When I went to get on a plane to come here, there was a nice sign, something to the effect of “If you're rude, we can refuse service.” I would actually like that in my office, but then I would have no one in my caseload.

Someone once said, "Zef, do you have Tourette's?” I said, “No. I just swear a lot.”

You acclimatize to your environment to some extent. Harassment and bullying, I would say, are rampant and need to be dealt with. CSC has made strides, but it's a very big issue.

Then there's working in the environment itself. People think there are guards, the correctional officers, and inmates. That's not how it works. There are those people, but the parole officer and the single mother who's the clerk are also on the unit with 120 inmates. They say it's a medium security prison, but some medium security prisons have more lifers than the maximums do. They have our biggest riots, for example in the Saskatchewan Penitentiary, where it was somewhat linked to the food issue, maybe. There are a variety of issues. Drumheller penitentiary was burned down. Those were medium security.

I'm used to going in, but they're very high-stress places. The paperwork is almost overbearing on the front-line staff, and doing that extra work interferes with casework. I mean, the POs are being asked to organize weddings, and I ask, “Well, which do you do?” Do you pick housing and get someone at housing to organize another offender's...? There's this piling of good ideas.

Anyway, there are harassment issues and a high-stress environment, and they've had a detrimental effect on the front-line staff and the offenders.

[Audra Andrews]

First of all, the morale can be really low at times, especially in the job that we do. It's extraordinarily difficult. The level of vicarious trauma amongst parole officers and correctional staff is extremely high, and it's cumulative.

We need to have training, which CSC has actually put into place—it's called Road to Mental Readiness—so there is some training in place, but overall, I think our training to help us regain skills has really decreased in quality over the years. We need to have an increase in the quality of training. It needs to be in-person training. We need to access subject matter experts outside of the service.

We need to be freed up to do our jobs, which is interacting with offenders. That is our job. Right now, we're so bogged down in paperwork and compliance issues that we can't do our jobs. I'm a little bit luckier in the community in that I'm freed up a little more to do some of that, but if you want the most bang for your buck, free us up from the paperwork that we're bogged down with. I know it's necessary—I'm not saying it's not—but we need to be freed up to do the work that we were hired to do.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Your union, if I'm not mistaken, also represents some of the other workers within the system, teachers and people like that. Am I correct?

A lot of what you're saying would apply to that specific example, but there could be a number of others who are working directly in achieving some of these goals, such as getting people jobs when they leave and things like that.

We talked about the medium, minimum, maximum. One of the things that's come up a few times since this study began is the overrepresentation of indigenous people in maximum security institutions. What are your thoughts on how CSC goes about classifying who goes where? Do you see any problems with that, and if so, what are some solutions you might be able to provide?

[Audra Andrews]

One of the initial tools they use is the custody rating scale. I believe Mr. Zinger probably touched on that, as the correctional investigator has in the past.

I know the validity of the some of the tools has been questioned. I guess the higher-ups probably know more than I do in regard to what the plans are for those tools. I know that in some committee meetings they talked about using the criminal risk index.

Perhaps they need to look at some of those culturally relevant tools, because often the custody rating scale—and I've done hundreds of them in my career—is unfairly biased on aboriginal offenders. Their security rating is going to come out higher all the time. Very rarely did I have an offender who would come out as minimum. It was very rare.

[Zef Ordman]

There are different things. They talk about actuarial tools, and there are a whole bunch of those. Then there are professional judgment tools, which means you're the parole officer looking at that offender and the situations that happen. There's entering the system—you enter as a maximum, medium, or minimum—but then once you're in the system, are you going to go up or down? With many, but not all, aboriginal offenders, if there's violence, they're going up. I could explain that at length.

We've cut off segregation, which is a good thing, because it was overused, but now the question is how to manage that. Now there are more unintended consequences; there's more violence and other behaviour inside the institution. Where do you put these people? You get two or three gangs—

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you. I appreciate it. I hate to be the cutter-offer.

[Zef Ordman]

Well, it's hard to explain. It's okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Ms. Dabrusin, you have seven minutes, please.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you.

I really appreciate hearing from your experience. It's helpful to get that coming from the front lines, as opposed to always a view looking down from above.

One of the things Dr. Zinger mentioned in the earlier hour as leading to higher security classifications was fetal alcohol syndrome. In your experience, what programs or what ability do we have to properly assess how to handle fetal alcohol syndrome within the system? Also, if you have any recommendations, I would like to hear them.

[Zef Ordman]

I want to say technically almost nothing, and I would suspect many of the inmates on my caseload suffered from that. However, it's thousands of dollars, and who's going to pay for and do the assessment?

Inside of CSC, when we say someone's mental health is stable, we're comparing them to other inmates. We're not comparing them to the general population. If we compare most of the offenders or inmates, they're off the charts.

I would suspect fetal alcohol. I would expect mental health issues. There's depression. There's PTSD. You need psychologists and doctors, not the parole officer who is trying to put this information....

There are lots of gaps. We can't even get timely information from the police when they come in, because they don't have the resources. It's not that they're mean-spirited.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

I don't know if you had something, Ms. Andrews.

[Audra Andrews]

I was just going to say that anecdotally I can tell you the levels are higher than people would expect. When they get to the community, very often we may have suspicions that they have FASD, but we don't have the access to do a proper assessment.

Sometimes, if we're lucky enough, we have something called a “community mental health team”. They may have some connections to get that assessment done, but there are waiting lists in the community, and only a very specific skill set is applicable. For instance, for psychologists to do the assessment, they have to have a very specific skill set to do a proper assessment for FASD, because it requires so much information. Yes, anecdotally there are quite a few, but without proper assessments I don't really have a clear answer.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Would that be the answer you want? Would it be helpful for you to have assessments at an earlier stage in the institutions?

[Zef Ordman]

Well, it's the assessment, but it's also the resources to deal with the assessment. Just telling someone they have fetal alcohol syndrome or PTSD, if there's no way to treat them....

There might not be a solution, but right now we don't even have that initial information.

[Audra Andrews]

The earlier, the better. We're talking about programming, but an offender with FASD is going to have a limited capacity to benefit from a program if they can't actually participate. Sometimes there are behaviours associated with FAS that preclude them from being able to succeed in a program, so the earlier the assessment, the better.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you.

I really like your analogy, Mr. Ordman. You have been talking about the stool without legs, or without all of the legs. Ms. Connidis, director general of the crime prevention, corrections, and criminal justice directorate at Public Safety Canada, came to speak with us. One of the things she talked about was an indigenous community corrections initiative for community safety planning, going out into communities to try to build that community support. Have you heard of anything being improved as a result of that? Is that working?

[Audra Andrews]

In order to prepare for this, I listened to ParlVu and I was really enthused by that idea. I'm unaware of how it's communicated to the front line. If I had not listened to it, I wouldn't have known about it. I'm very enthused about hearing that kind of stuff, because I did work in the community before I worked with corrections. When I worked at an aboriginal organization, if someone came up to me and talked about section 84, I asked, “What?” I didn't know what it was. Then I came into the field and I had an understanding of what it was.

Some of the communities don't know what they don't know. When I've gone into some of the communities and done some release planning with them in the past, their capacity is not there. They want to work with offenders, but the knowledge and the capacity and the resources are just not there. We need to do it in partnership with Public Safety, because they can't do it in isolation. We should be working alongside them.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

That's good. You raised a good point about involving you on the front line as these discussions are happening so that you can be aware of how that's playing out.

I have offered my colleague Mr. Saini my last minute and a half.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

In a minute and a half I'll ask a very simple question and you can give me an answer in a minute and a half.

Obviously there's going to be some commonality among the general pool of offenders. One of the things I heard you speak of in the previous hour is that there are mental health issues and there are also addiction issues. If you're really going to help somebody, if those two issues are not dealt with, then no programming or anything else is going to help. Is there a checklist? Are there criteria?

When you go to a physician, there's a checklist. They check your cholesterol, your blood pressure, your blood sugars. They go through that checklist to know exactly how to analyze the problem.

If an offender appears and you go through a checklist, there has to be some commonality over the course of time, especially with your experience, whether it be mental health or addictions. If those two issues are not dealt with, in my understanding or experience, going down the line, you're not going to get the best of what you're trying to offer. Is that done, or should more resources be applied to it? Give me an idea of how it works.