Public Safety committee  The simple answer to that question is no, I haven't, and part of it was that I took seriously the plan that the panel I chaired had in place, which was that we were going to be looking at the data in the early days of the operation of the SIUs. Our plan was to look at it in early

Public Safety committee  I don't have a simple answer to that question. The problem is that we're dealing with a description that CSC has given us. We can identify the problem, but I don't have simple solutions to suggest to you. I think that the first thing that needs to be done on all of these matters

Public Safety committee  Whether they acknowledge it as such or whether they acknowledge the fact that the lengths of time do vary is at least a start. At the moment, remember that we don't even have an acknowledgement that there are any problems whatsoever that are not caused by prisoners in the SIUs.

Public Safety committee  We took the definitions from the Mandela rules. We gave what we would consider to be a very conservative threshold for defining something as either solitary confinement or torture, so our numbers are probably lower than most people would have put them. We then looked at how many

Public Safety committee  I think the answer to that is fairly simple. We used the definition that the Correctional Service of Canada does for those activities. It is very broad and very vague. When we did that, using CSC's own assessment as to whether time out of cell was meaningful human activity, we fo

Public Safety committee  —we don't have to get to their question.

Public Safety committee  I think what you might want to consider is that Black prisoners are overrepresented in the SIUs, so they're overrepresented in the Correctional Service of Canada to begin with. About 30% of prisoners in CSC facilities are Black, and close to 40% are going into the SIUs. Going ba

Public Safety committee  Well, they are certainly overrepresented in the Correctional Service of Canada. They're highly represented in the institutions and in the SIUs. I think the treatment in the SIUs between the two disadvantaged groups—Blacks and indigenous people—actually does vary. Some of our anal

Public Safety committee  I'm not sure what would be the best way to deal with this problem. It would seem to me that one of our first problems is that CSC is not addressing any of these issues.

Public Safety committee  One of the things our report shows over and over again is a huge variability across the country. Some places are much worse than others. Why can't we learn from those experiences?

Public Safety committee  My own feeling is that part of what is necessary but not sufficient is a decent form of independent overview of what's going on. We don't have that. That would be a starting point.

Public Safety committee  It's not well defined in the legislation, and that is a problem, or certainly would be a problem if CSC were even capable of providing meaningful human contact of any kind to a substantial number of prisoners. What we're finding is, however it's defined, even CSC is telling us

Public Safety committee  These are administrative data. They're the basic, ongoing records that CSC has of all prisoners, including those in structured intervention units. Any administrative data I've worked on from the last 50 years has had errors in it, but there's no reason to believe the errors woul

Public Safety committee  No. The delay came from their not wanting to give us the data. They didn't know at that point what the data really showed. They told me on the phone in February 2020 that they weren't sure if they were going to give us the data because they didn't think we needed the data. It was

Public Safety committee  The simple answer to that, based on data, is that we don't really know since the data we have date from the beginning of the SIUs on November 30, 2019. Certainly what we can say is that the bill to abolish the practices, which established the SIUs, did not work. Those practices