Public Safety committee  I don't know if it's that black and white. It's where that inmate is in his sentence, whether he's predator or prey in a jail. There are so many factors to come up with when you make that statement to the inmate in terms of whether he's going to consider it. His age and his affil

Public Safety committee  Again, that's one of those very loaded questions.

Public Safety committee  It's not so much that we see this as a bill that is right or wrong. I mean I know it was said, “Oh, it's something new and we don't know”, but how it's written we don't see how to operationalize it to make it a useful thing. Certainly, somebody who has a condition for release and

Public Safety committee  Certainly. As I said, detection is a big key. You know you have a good handle on the drug trade when you start seeing lots of brew being made in jail. They make home brew. That's an indication. That's almost, as correctional officers, what we strive for. I say that jokingly, bu

Public Safety committee  For us, they're contraband. We've never looked at or supported a needle exchange. I know there are a lot of different things that happen on the street and in different countries to deal with needle exchange, but we always see them as weapons. We see them as a danger for us as cor

Public Safety committee  They're not as accessible as they once were. We have seen a decline in the availability for a host of reasons. One is the higher numbers and the double-bunking. Ontario and the Prairies are probably two of the biggest in terms of double-bunking. It's difficult, because you don't

Public Safety committee  Yes, and that's why I say you have a 24-hour day and you have to try to cut up the piece of that pie to make everything fit. Then you have incidences of violence on the rise, and gang activity is on the rise in prisons. That brings more lockdowns, which then shut down or postpo

Public Safety committee  The double-bunking is lowering. The Prairies and Ontario regions still have double-bunking. The new beds and new units coming online certainly are welcomed by us because they reduce the double-bunking. The problem is that the infrastructure isn't there. You're still putting 40

Public Safety committee  Yes, sir. Some of our primary jobs are looking for contraband, looking for drugs, interviewing inmates, and finding out what's going on in the jail, who's running the drug trade, who's running those things. That's most of our day. So more tools certainly are welcome. We're jus

Public Safety committee  You're asking the million-dollar question. After 35 years, I don't know if I can truly answer whether something has made an inmate turn left rather than right simply by that. That's a very difficult one to answer.

Public Safety committee  Overcrowding is what happens. The average Canadian doesn't care whether we put three inmates in a cell or four inmates in a cell, but for us as correctional officers, we certainly do because we have to open the cells. The corrections model we have here in Canada is for programs

Public Safety committee  Any contraband introduced into the jail is something we always chase our tail about. We're always looking for it. We don't believe an exchange program will work. We've been asking your government time and time again, I think since 2007, for drug testing on us for blood exposure.

Public Safety committee  I think part of the increase in seizures is because of more detector dogs, some more tools we've been given to find drugs. The stream of drugs coming in has always been fairly constant; we just haven't always had the tools to detect that. Now we do have some of the tools, so the

Public Safety committee  No, sir, I haven't.

Public Safety committee  Having great knowledge regarding what you just spoke about, I'd say probably 85% to 95% of our inmates have some type of an addiction that either brought them or got them into prison. That being said, every inmate is at that risk. That is always looked at for every inmate in thei