Public Safety committee  Thank you very much for the kind invitation to the John Howard Society to appear on this issue, which is very important to us. The John Howard Society is a community-based charity whose mission is to support effective, just, and humane responses to the causes and the consequenc

Public Safety committee  Okay. I will get through these very quickly. One, we think interdiction should be part of a broader strategy for dealing with drugs and alcohol in the prisons. Two, the prevalence and policies associated with false positives in current interdiction techniques should be assesse

Public Safety committee  Because it is a right to accept or refuse treatment, you should not be penalized for exercising your rights one way or another.

Public Safety committee  At this point probably prevention is gone because they're probably already involved with drugs. From our perspective, it would be treatment, bringing them to a place where they have a certain physiological capacity to overcome an addiction and then make free choices about what th

Public Safety committee  There's lots of room for additional types of programming as well. There are some good and effective programs, but a lot of the alcohol and drug treatment models are based on white, adult male addiction. They may not necessarily be culturally relevant or gender specific. They cert

Public Safety committee  My preference would be to actually focus on those who are exploiting the market of offenders' vulnerability to drugs, who are making a profit on getting those drugs to inmates, and try to focus the enforcement elements on that. If you're looking at inmates in facilities, many o

Public Safety committee  I think the prison system has been a model system. I think the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, which was brought in under the Mulroney government, has been viewed as a significant piece of corrections legislation throughout the world. I think it is something to be emulat

Public Safety committee  I think there is some confusion about what is actually being done. Some of the information we have is that they're building secure cells in medium security facilities, which raises a whole lot of issues in terms of Corrections policies. There will be a need for additional cell s

Public Safety committee  I actually have always been of the view that a very small percentage of offenders in the facilities are using drugs, and it's a good sign if the number has moved from 12% to 7%. That's a very positive thing. My concern about things getting worse comes from the implication of the

Public Safety committee  The translation isn't working. May I answer in English?

Public Safety committee  I think the rehabilitation programs are extremely important and should be encouraged. There's an opportunity to look at expanding on successful programs. What is key in rehabilitation for drug issues is matching the right type of treatment to the particular reasons for the addict

Public Safety committee  It's a noble aspiration, but I think you're going to have to deal with the downside risk that it won't take place. There is considerable increased unrest and violence among inmates who are addicted and looking for drugs. Moreover, there's the damage done to facilitating family re

Justice committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. The position of the John Howard Society of Canada is that Bill C-10 will not make streets or communities safer, despite the huge outlay of taxpayers' money. It will instead make communities less safe while eroding rights and pr

Justice committee  I think there's something to be said for that. You're quite right, we first saw a benchmark by the Supreme Court of the United States in May indicating in the case of Brown v. Plata that 137.5% of overcapacity violated cruel and unusual standards there. In our provincial system

Justice committee  It would be my sense that if the legislation violated rights through the administration of this legislation in the provinces and the charter problems were arising in the provinces, the Minister of Justice would need to take that into account when looking at his certification. Yes