Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll start us off. First, I want to say hello to the members of the committee and to thank them for this invitation to speak on behalf of the Union of Safety and Justice Employees. USJE has approximately 18,000 members, a large percentage of whom work for t

Public Safety committee  Recently sentenced offenders are transferred from court to a Correctional Service of Canada assessment unit, where they undergo the intake assessment process. At that stage, CSC officers gather all available information on the offender and use the tool you just referred to, the c

Public Safety committee  Would you please repeat the question? I honestly thought you had put it to Mr. Sandelli, so I may have missed a few details.

Public Safety committee  At the start of the sentence, it's actually the parole officer's role to gather the relevant information, use the information at his disposal, ensure that the file is complete, use the custody rating scale and make a final recommendation to institution management regarding the in

Public Safety committee  There are two types of transfers for inmates during their sentence. Actually, there are three. First of all, there's the voluntary transfer. That's the one that's granted in response to an inmate's request. There's also the involuntary transfer, which is made at the request of th

Public Safety committee  Here we're talking about a standard voluntary transfer, which requires a recommendation from the case management team. In one of the most common situations, an inmate may wish to have access to services in the language of his choice. For example, an anglophone may want to leave

Public Safety committee  I quite honestly don't have that information. All I can give you are the observations I've been able to make during my career. Parole officers handle a certain number of cases. In my career, that has varied between 25 and 30 files. A deviation from what's prescribed by the custo

Public Safety committee  Yes, we have to look at the case as a whole. We have tools that can be used to get results, whether it be the custody rating scale, which is used at the start of an inmate's sentence or when the inmate returns to an institution following a failure in the community, or the securit

Public Safety committee  I can answer first, if no one has any objection. The professionals we represent obviously want maximum independence and autonomy when developing their recommendations. That's what we want. I would say that public safety is a sensitive topic. The people at the bottom resent chan

Public Safety committee  Excessive workloads are still an ongoing problem. They were already an issue when I started my career in 1999. The workload of parole officers at the institutions is calculated based on numbers of offenders per officer, and that number has constantly risen over the years. When r

Public Safety committee  The same parole officer will make a recommendation to transfer an inmate, a recommendation for a temporary absence and, later on, a recommendation for release. In each of those cases, the officer has to make his or her recommendation taking into account all the important factors

Public Safety committee  No, it doesn't happen often. It's quite rare. Generally speaking, the files reveal trends. Consequently, parole officers are able to work with the offenders and try to anticipate what will happen for them based on emerging trends. Is the inmate racking up offence reports and ins

Public Safety committee  I can answer that question. Our members, particularly correctional program officers and parole officers, receive training based on ethnic issues. That training is given to them regularly, every year or two years. The statistics are known in the system and our members are informe

Public Safety committee  When an inmate is transferred from one institution to another, whether in the same or another region, there's a complete change of team. The inmate winds up with a new parole officer, a new CX‑2 and many other new people who will be working with that inmate. Inmates thus do not

Public Safety committee  If my understanding is correct, you want to know what responsibility the former parole officer has toward the new parole officer when a transfer occurs. Is that correct?