Public Safety committee  I'm not sure. I'd be interested to hear Don Head's point of view on whether or not he has seen an impact from the ban or a change in the presence of drugs in institutions after the tobacco ban. I would suggest that it has probably not changed all that much. As I said, a chocolate

Public Safety committee  I'm not sure, and yes.

Public Safety committee  Yes. It was a form of currency of some sort. Potato chips are a form of currency in prisons.

Public Safety committee  What I'm saying is that I'm not sure we measure it as well as we should; therefore, maybe we are not quite educated in determining how successful we are in doing it. The job is to correct people; 100% of the people who leave should be corrected. That is nirvana; we should strug

Public Safety committee  We have people with hugely more complicated problems than we had 30 years ago, and our average sentence time is going down. We have less time to help these people than we had in the past. How is it humanly possible to get somebody who I just described—with a grade eight education

Public Safety committee  It could well be both, but what you should be looking for is the success of the rehabilitation programs. If you can rehabilitate the guy in three years, go for it. Get him out in society as soon as we can to prove that in fact you have been able to do that.

Public Safety committee  It could potentially be both. I'm saying it's success. Right now we are not getting.... It is just not humanly possible to do what you have to do to some of these people in the average sentence time, especially when that sentence time is compressed because of things such as sta

Public Safety committee  Not many years ago, the Brits started a program for measuring the success of their jails and prisons by the rehabilitation rate—the reoffending rate—of those who had gone through it. That has proven hugely successful in challenging the institutions to make sure the right programs

Public Safety committee  It all boils down to money eventually, but even within the institution, it may not have the obvious appearance of dollars. For instance, I went into one institution and a fellow half my size—probably 90 pounds—was able to walk between a crowd of guys twice my size. They parted

Public Safety committee  I'm not going to give you one recommendation; I'm going to give you 109. But I'm going to try to boil it down. I think your question is what the state's role is. I think the state's role is to provide the opportunity. I've probably been in more correctional institutions than an

Public Safety committee  No, other than to know there has been some drop in the level of detection within institutions, it would seem to indicate that apart from issues around masking of drugs and the other things that are happening with the institutions, that tightening up the walls, doors, and gates is

Public Safety committee  Right.

Public Safety committee  Sure, but that's why we have 109 recommendations in our report dealing with the whole basket of challenges facing Corrections, one of which is drugs. I think I was quite clear when we issued the report, and the panel encouraged me to say this as the chair, that it's a fulsome 109

Public Safety committee  Interdiction is critical because without interdiction you're not going to have effective programming in institutions. Right now, you have people attending—I'll say that word again, “attending”—drug addiction programs and then going back and shooting up in their cells. Why? Becaus

Public Safety committee  Yes. The first block of our recommendations deals with offender accountability. I think you've hit the nail on the head. There's a reason that's number one and not number five in our report. Part of the reason male or female inmates are where they are, whether it's the federal c