Madam Chair, like my colleague, I am going to speak to what is in the bill. I will even go a little further, just to give it a little more thought and plant some ideas.
I will obviously talk about pilot projects during incarceration, but I will also talk about what can be done after incarceration and what can also be done as an alternative to incarceration.
In terms of pilot projects during incarceration, one of the last places someone would want to refer to is our neighbour to the south, since the Americans do not necessarily have the best reputation when it comes to detention and the prison system.
However, in 1975, something quite extraordinary happened. One day, an inmate found an injured bird on his windowsill and began to care for it. It was later found that not only did the inmate have better social skills and behaviour, that he was less violent and less medicated, but that this had a positive effect on the entire cell block.
That experience gave rise to a series of pilot projects in the United States. There is now a project running in 290 correctional facilities across the 50 states to teach inmates to become dog trainers. An individual comes to train the inmates, and then they are assigned a dog. The inmates learn how to train the dogs over a period of 12 to 18 months, depending on the type of pilot project. In some cases, the dogs even live with them in their cells.
In the case of almost every inmate who participated in these pilot projects, there was a very significant reduction in medication needs, a decrease in suicide attempts and suicides in jail, a marked reduction in violence and, later, a decrease in recidivism.
This type of pilot project benefits not just the inmates, but the animals as well. The dogs chosen to participate often have behaviour problems and are not suitable for adoption. These dogs are assigned to the inmates, who train them so they can be adopted. In other cases, dogs with better social skills are trained by inmates to become service dogs.
In addition to helping inmates reintegrate, these projects benefit the community. Not only do inmates have a better success rate with the animals than outside volunteers, for example, but many inmates decide to continue training dogs after they get out of prison.
That is a success story that we can learn from, even though, as I mentioned, the United States does not necessarily have the best track record when it comes to prison conditions. The other good thing is that inmates have to exhibit good behaviour in order to qualify for this program, and that generally acts as an incentive for inmates to behave better while they are in prison.
That being said, the absence of recidivism does not automatically mean that an inmate has been rehabilitated. An inmate is not necessarily rehabilitated just because they have not reoffended. I have a rather striking example to give in that regard. One of my colleagues was walking down the street with a former inmate who had served a long sentence for murder. When they came to a red light with no one else around, she crossed the street, but the former inmate remained rooted to the spot. He did not want to jaywalk. The rule was clear: crossing the street when the light is red is not allowed. He absolutely did not want to break the rule. That shows that prison teaches inmates to follow many rules to the letter, but they may be losing some of the social skills they need to be properly rehabilitated.
Obviously I am not trying to say that jaywalking can be used to measure rehabilitation, but I wanted to show that when inmates get out of prison, they often do not have all the skills they need to perfectly reintegrate into society.
I said I would talk about post-incarceration support because that is just as important. The bill introduced by our colleague from Tobique—Mactaquac raises the possibility of joining communal and faith-based initiatives and getting support from various organizations, but that means being close to those organizations, which remains problematic.
It is a real problem for offenders who live in the far north, especially in Inuit communities, and who have to serve time in detention centres far from home.
Around Montreal, we often see a high proportion of Inuit and indigenous individuals in the homeless population. What are these people doing in Montreal?
In many cases, they are people who were sentenced to serve time in detention facilities near Montreal. The plane ride to jail is covered, but once they have served their time, nobody pays for the return flight, which is often prohibitively expensive.
Once these people get out of jail, they are thrust into another kind of prison, the prison of poverty and homelessness on the streets of an unfamiliar city, instead of being given the opportunity to get into rehabilitation and reintegration programs that could be offered in their communities.
If we want the pilot projects proposed in the bill to work, we have to make sure all the options and tools are available to run them. That is something else we will have to think about.
We also need to look at alternatives to incarceration, which is not always the appropriate solution. I have some more examples to share, including in connection with the indigenous community.
The Gladue reports really emphasized the need to include indigenous peoples in the sentencing process. I had the privilege of attending a conference on indigenous law where it was explained that, in some countries, there are actually blended courts that take a blended approach by incorporating indigenous law.
I have an example of something fairly unusual that was done here, when a judge came up with an innovative sentence. Rather than imposing a custodial sentence on someone convicted of rape in his community, the judge made him live outside his community and become the designated hunter for a women's shelter.
For two years, that individual lived apart from his community and served another community by hunting for people who were essentially victims of the same kind of crime he had committed. At the end of his sentence, he was allowed to return to his community because it felt that he had paid the price for his actions. His reintegration was much easier because it was done in collaboration with the community, which would not have been the case if that individual had had a sentence imposed that did not align with the community's values.
Another example illustrates what can be done. It involves the PPTCQ, the drug treatment program of the court of Quebec. Section 720 of the Criminal Code allows for sentencing to be delayed in cases where people are struggling with substance use problems. Often, these people will not use drugs during their sentence. However, upon release, some will not comply with the conditions of release and will use drugs again at the first opportunity.
Rather than announcing the sentence immediately, this program examines whether the person is progressing well in detox and adjusts the sentence accordingly. The sentence may even be cancelled altogether if their progress has been good.
For these initiatives to work, however, there must be no minimum sentences. Minimum sentences are a barrier that can prevent some projects from being implemented, and they do not always work.
For example, at one time, during the famine in England, turnip thefts were common. The turnip growers asked the authorities to increase penalties to deter people from stealing turnips. The authorities made it a capital offence to steal a turnip. After that, there were more turnip thefts than ever, because no one was afraid of being sentenced to death just for stealing a turnip. Sometimes, instead of serving as a deterrent, a denunciatory sentence can have the opposite effect.
What I want to say is that I welcome the bill. I especially hope that we can learn from these examples that one-size-fits-all, universal solutions are not necessarily the ones that work best. I hope that this is what emerges from our future reflections on detention, on sentencing, and on criminal law in general.