Public Safety committee  Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much. I don't profess to know a great deal about the range of experiences in Canada, but the research that I mentioned by Professor Bonta, whom you're going to be talking to later on, was one of the early pieces of methodologically sound research into electronic monitoring.

Public Safety committee  In Sweden, the integrated measures are employment: you have to have a job in order to be subject to their electronic monitoring program as an alternative to custody. Chances are you will have been convicted of a particular type of crime, which may have been related to alcohol, drugs, or your anger and aggression.

Public Safety committee  That's true. It's the same with alcohol consumption. You can consume alcohol at home to excess. You're right. Electronic monitoring is not a solution to any criminal or unacceptable behaviour that can be done in the home.

Public Safety committee  That's a perfectly fair question. Does electronic monitoring reinforce the thinking of a person who wants to rehabilitate himself and desist from crime? We do have some evidence that electronic monitoring can work in that way. A piece of research we conducted, this time outside the government, suggests that for some offenders, electronic monitoring did act as a kind of break from the lifestyle they were leading.

Public Safety committee  It's about breaking old habits as much as it's about creating new ones. “Habit-breaking” is a good way of describing it.

Public Safety committee  Yes, it is. Particularly for an offender who is not used to staying at home, it can be a very stressful experience, and not just for the offender—

Public Safety committee  —but for the technically innocent members of his family. There may well be stresses and strains that arise there. The offender and the family have a telephone they can use to ring up the monitoring centre and say, “Look, I just can't stand having this person in the house anymore.

Public Safety committee  No, I don't have an earpiece.

Public Safety committee  The best is bail, because I can accept a stand-alone use of electronic monitoring if you have overcrowded remand prisons. The second best is a community penalty, if you use it with other measures. The third best is early release, preferably if you use it with other measures.

Public Safety committee  No, I mean with support. You can build all sorts of conditions like that into electronic monitoring. In some instances, you can use electronic monitoring to monitor the conditions, but when I'm talking about “other measures”, I'm talking about supportive and rehabilitative measures alongside a surveillance technology.

Public Safety committee  Yes. It could be drug treatment, alcohol treatment, mental health treatment, mentoring, educational work, and employment training. All of that is far more important in reducing recidivism than electronic monitoring by itself, but electronic monitoring can add an element of control to those social work measures that those measures don't have on their own.

Public Safety committee  The crudest way to give an example is simply to point out that if a person is subject to a probation order that requires them to do an element of community service and attend a drug treatment and testing program, if all that is over and done by five o'clock in the afternoon, what happens at night?

Public Safety committee  Yes. No electronic monitoring comes close to that.

Public Safety committee  I didn't use the phrase “peer review”. Perhaps you misheard me. They were piloted.