Human Resources committee  Yes. Otherwise, we'd have to be chasing bank accounts out in the community, and to be honest, sir, I'd rather be a correctional service agency than a collection agency.

Human Resources committee  If the moneys are actually being deposited into his account there, there would be the automatic deduction occurring for the room and board.

Human Resources committee  No, sir. I have enough challenges running a correctional system, as opposed to a collection agency.

Human Resources committee  Yes. The quick and easy way to circumvent the system—I'm not sure why I would be telling this in public to encourage them—is to have—

Human Resources committee  Yes, it is. It's to have the money deposited in the community and have somebody else who has access to the account then make a gift deposit, which then goes in the savings account, not the current account.

Human Resources committee  Again, Madam Chair and committee members, it goes back to my earlier comment; it's going to depend on what you define as a dependant, because there are going to be certain pieces of information I'm not going to be able to gather for you. I can tell who is a dependent child simply by age--

Human Resources committee  Again, we'll have to go back and do the file review to get that, but if you're looking at dependency based on family income or financial status, I'm not going to be able to do that at all.

Human Resources committee  Madam Chair, in terms of my basic definition, again, some of the qualifications that were added there, I'm not going to be able to tell you whether somebody is dependent and disabled. I'm not going to be able to talk about financial status. I can tell you marital status. I can tell you if there are children, as done by the common definition as to whether those individuals live at home with the spouse.

Human Resources committee  I'm still in my timeframe of two months.

Human Resources committee  For the waiving, yes.

Human Resources committee  The way the policy is laid out, it's automatic, but the institutional head can make an exception to not collect the room and board. That is the area in which the institutional head exercises the authority: to suspend or not to collect it. So it's done automatically.

Human Resources committee  Again, Madam Chair and committee members, the way the current legislation is prescribed, it has to meet one of those five definitions in the regulations. If it doesn't meet that I can't touch the money, and if it's money that is deposited out into the community and then just comes in as personal deposits by somebody else or as a gift from somebody else, I can't touch the money because the current act and regulations do not allow me to touch it.

Human Resources committee  We have no authority to do that.

Human Resources committee  I can give you the overall costs. We're currently in the process of refining what the incremental costs are for offenders, but we always report out the overall costs first. For example, last fiscal year the average cost to maintain somebody in an institution was $109,000 a year.

Human Resources committee  That's the process we're doing now. We're updating those numbers. Within the next few weeks, we'll be able to give the updated incremental costs for that. We know, for example, that inmate food per year costs us $1,300 per offender, which is $5 per day. In terms of the inmate pay, we know the calculations there based on the various pay rates.