Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the committee.

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much. It's just for a short presentation.

Public Safety committee  First, I would like to introduce myself, which will help members better focus their questions. I have a doctorate in criminology and worked for 27 years with the Correctional Service of Canada, including 15 years in five different penitentiaries as a parole officer and acting cl

Public Safety committee  Sir, I will answer very clearly. There is a lot of waste within the Correctional Service. There are two major groups of professionals that we should pay close attention to. We should double the number of parole officers in the institutions and quadruple the number of parole offic

Public Safety committee  It's okay, no problem. It will come back.

Public Safety committee  Every time there's an incident in the Correctional Service, we look to punish people at the bottom instead of looking to the top of the pyramid. A report, whatever it is, has multiple signatures. There's the signature of the officer in charge of the file. A quality control is do

Public Safety committee  No. Community correctional centres, which are under federal jurisdiction, have federal staff, i.e., federal parole officers. They are highly structured halfway houses with curfews. Their specialty is to work with sex offenders, organized crime members, and people who require clos

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Harris. I'd like to remind you that crystal balls don't exist. All prisoners, whoever they are, whatever the nature of the offence, are all going to be released conditionally into the community. It's only a matter of time. Now, it is all well and good to set up pr

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Harris. I said it earlier in my preamble. There's a shortage of staff. Quadruple the federal parole officers in the community and have them meet with inmates in provincial halfway houses. There is a lack of time, a lack of staff. If this inmate had been placed in

Public Safety committee  It doesn't relate to Mr. Harris' question. What I just wanted to say, and I'll come back to this because it's very important, is that there are people who are killed by supervised inmates in the community. Earlier I was talking about Celia Ruygrok, a case which led to a commissi

Public Safety committee  Fine. Thank you, sir.

Public Safety committee  At one point, there were four members for every murder case. It was very simple. The number then dropped to three members for budget reasons. Today, many hearings are conducted by teleconference. There's no longer even any contact. There's nothing left. It has come down to this.

Public Safety committee  Mr. Shipley, when I speak of danger, I'm talking about serious cases serving long prison sentences. I have no objection to federal inmates serving shorter sentences being mixed with provincial inmates. The risk is that inmates labelled as serious cases—these people have generally

Public Safety committee  Mr. McKay will reprimand me for answering that question. I'm likely to run out of time. We could talk about this for hours. I've written extensive research articles on this issue. It's an industry, a business. The programs work if the person wants them to work. You can have the

Public Safety committee  Excuse me.