Public Accounts committee  There is only one service standard. The 24-hour contact is the same regardless of what region of the world you are arrested in. We looked to see whether they made reasonable efforts. In some cases they were denied access by the local government, but we looked to see that this was

Public Accounts committee  There is no need for me to say anything.

Public Accounts committee  We found that CSC had reduced its use of segregation, so the number of placements in segregation had decreased over the three years that we looked at. Under the CCRA segregation legislation, there are very strict requirements to segregate. Primarily, it deals with the safety of t

Public Accounts committee  I would add that public safety is absolutely the number one priority. CSC research has repeatedly demonstrated that parole supervision—and a long time of parole supervision, the maximum amount of time under supervision in the community—has the best results in terms of public safe

Public Accounts committee  We looked to see if CSC itself had evaluated the effectiveness of the programs. They had conducted recent evaluations of their general stream of correctional programs, as well as their specialized programs for aboriginal women. For the general stream of programs, they looked prim

Public Accounts committee  The section 84 release plans can be made with either a home community or a community organization. We found a mix of the two. Certainly, if you want to go to a healing lodge, your only options are the healing lodges that exist now in Saskatchewan or Alberta, but certainly the sec

Public Accounts committee  Certainly, that was the finding of “Creating Choices” in 1990, when they decided to close the Kingston penitentiary for women. They wanted to set up penitentiaries across the country so that they could have some more regionalization and women could be closer to their home communi

Public Accounts committee  The issues and concerns that were raised in our report were that where there were small numbers of indigenous offenders within one of the five institutions, there was limited access to services, so we put the option to Correctional Services to figure out how to do that. I know

Public Accounts committee  Section 84 release plans are release plans through which CSC works with the community to supervise the release of offenders. Community organizations can be on reserve or in urban centres. We found they have been increasingly used for indigenous offenders, and generally they are v

Status of Women committee  Certainly, there have been recommendations made in the past to increase the number of healing lodges available, particularly for women offenders. There are only two healing lodges that operate for women offenders, one in Saskatchewan and one in Manitoba. Those two healing lodges

Status of Women committee  We noted, for instance, that it takes a lot of time to complete each program. It can take around five months. Most women are ready to be released in less than one year and so they cannot finish a program they begin before the date of their release. We therefore recommended that

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  We did find that offenders, not just women but men, who participate in healing lodges have very low rates of reoffending upon release.

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  Yes.