Public Safety committee  Thank you very much. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It's an honour to have this opportunity to speak to you today about mental health and addiction services in correctional settings. My name is James Livingston, and I'm a researcher with the Forensic

Public Safety committee  I'm fairly novice as to the current state of operations of our correctional system and what's happening on the ground, so my comments are really limited to my understanding of the research and literature. Back to your question about ineffective and inhumane, it's obvious from t

Public Safety committee  No. As I stated earlier, I'm a researcher, so I don't provide clinical service.

Public Safety committee  Yes, I'm familiar with it. Was there a question? I'm sorry.

Public Safety committee  It's been shown in the literature to be a best practice.

Public Safety committee  I'm familiar with Matsqui and Portage, but I'm not aware of the comparison you're speaking about.

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  No.

Public Safety committee  Regarding that question, my familiarity is with the literature. I don't think it directly answers that question, but it does recognize that mental health and addiction services are delivered differently to different sized jails and prisons. The issues of the services you provide

Public Safety committee  I think the question is twofold. What the most common detected mental illnesses are is one question. What the common underlying, undetected mental illnesses are would be another question. With my familiarity with the literature, I can't separate it by men and women, although the

Public Safety committee  My comment as a student of criminology and sociology is that your question is very complex and it sort of hinges on the social determinants of both mental illness and crime, which are very related. Poverty, marginalization as such, living in impoverished neighbourhoods, and those

Public Safety committee  Depending on the population you're looking at, the country you're looking at, and the definition of mental illness or mental disorder, the figures range from 5% to 70% within the literature. And that is not just within a Canadian context. Meta-analysis has generally ballparked t

Public Safety committee  That's in prison populations. It also depends on how you define a prison population, because internationally it's defined quite differently.

Public Safety committee  I definitely take your point. The correctional environment is certainly difficult for delivering mental health and substance abuse services because of the inherent tensions within the environment. Having said that, others have done it, and there are innovative models. Within the

Public Safety committee  There are innovative models from the U.S. as well, so it's not just the U.K. There are psychiatric in-reach teams, in which mental health service providers go to prisons to provide services. There are people called trans-agency coordinators. They are responsible for coordinatin