Legislative Assembly of Ontario

ELECTRONIC MONITORING

ANTHONY DOOB
DIANNE MARTIN

PROBATION OFFICERS ASSOCIATION OF ONTARIO

ONTARIO ASSOCIATION OF COMMUNITY CORRECTIONAL RESIDENCES

JOHN HOWARD SOCIETY OF ONTARIO

CONTENTS

Tuesday 30 April 1996

Electronic monitoring

Anthony Doob; Dianne Martin

Probation Officers Association of Ontario

Lori Santamaria, director of protocol

Ontario Association of Community Correctional Residences

Joan Winchell, president

Arthur Stratton, member

John Howard Society of Ontario

Graham Stewart, executive director

STANDING COMMITTEE ON ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE

Chair / Président: Martiniuk, Gerry (Cambridge PC)

Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: Johnson, Ron (Brantford PC)

*Boyd, Marion (London Centre / -Centre ND)

Chiarelli, Robert (Ottawa West / -Ouest L)

Conway, Sean G. (Renfrew North / -Nord L)

*Doyle, Ed (Wentworth East / -Est PC)

*Guzzo, Garry J. (Ottawa-Rideau PC)

*Hampton, Howard (Rainy River ND)

Hudak, Tim (Niagara South / -Sud PC)

*Johnson, Ron (Brantford PC)

Klees, Frank (York-Mackenzie PC)

Leadston, Gary L. (Kitchener-Wilmot PC)

*Martiniuk, Gerry (Cambridge PC)

*Parker, John L. (York East / -Est PC)

*Ramsay, David (Timiskaming L)

*Tilson, David (Dufferin-Peel PC)

*In attendance / présents

Also taking part / Autres participants et participantes:

Castrilli, Annamarie (Downsview L)

O'Neal, Michael, manager, technology co-ordination unit, correctional services division

Clerk / Greffière: Donna Bryce

Staff / Personnel: Susan Swift, research officer, Legislative Research Service

The committee met at 1533 in room 228.

ELECTRONIC MONITORING

Consideration of the designated matter pursuant to standing order 125, relating to the impact of halfway house closures and the introduction of electronic monitoring.

ANTHONY DOOB
DIANNE MARTIN

The Chair (Mr Gerry Martiniuk): We have a quorum. If we could proceed with the standing committee on administration of justice. Our first presenters are not present. However, Professor Doob and Dianne Martin are both here, slated for 5 o'clock. They arrived early to make sure they were heard and we'll take you first if we may.

I welcome you to the committee and, as you know, the committee is studying the closing of halfway houses and the use of electronic monitoring devices. I understand you have some expertise in that area and I'd appreciate your proceeding.

Dr Anthony Doob: Thank you very much. First of all, I'd like to apologize for my own personal mistake -- I won't even share that with Dianne -- for not being here yesterday. I cleverly wrote it down as 4:30 today, notwithstanding the fact that I had been told two or three times and faxed that it was yesterday. So it was completely my error and I apologize to the committee for that.

I thought the two of us will be sharing the time before you, and in introducing the topic of electronic monitoring and halfway houses, we thought it would be useful to talk about where probably all of us in the room can agree on this sort of general issue. Really there are three points we would like to make about this.

The first is that offenders should be held accountable for what they've done. I think all of us can understand that and accept that.

The second point we would like to make is that scarce correctional resources should be used wisely and sensibly, and I suppose the emphasis really should be on the fact that these resources are scarce.

The third point I think really follows from the second, and that is that the criminal justice system should be focusing on serious crime, those areas of a substantial amount of crime in our society, and that really our priorities have to be on serious crime and in particular on serious violent crime.

The difficulty of course is as soon as we accept those principles, then we have to figure out what to do with them and how to implement them. Part of our starting point, and I think part of the purpose of the committee considering the issue which is before it today, is that obviously all people who are convicted of criminal offences don't have to be sent to prison, or if sent to prison don't have to be spending their full sentences within prison.

In thinking about this issue, in thinking about what to do with offenders who are under provincial control, I think we have to keep in mind the fact that all of these people are obviously being sentenced to less than two years, those who are going into prison. Many are not sentenced to imprisonment at all, and to a very large extent they're there in prison for not very serious offences.

Remember that the most serious offence in 1994-95 for close to three quarters of these people was not something which involved violence. We're talking about people who have committed criminal offences, but we're not talking about serious violent offences.

The other thing to remember, and I think it's important in the context of these issues, is that the sentences they're getting are relatively short; the median sentence, the average sentence, is about a little over a month. So people who are going into provincial custody are not going to be there for very long, and even those who are going into provincial custody for a long period of time are going to be released fairly soon back into the community. If one wants to look for a purpose of corrections, one of the things one might want to consider is that a very important part of the correctional system is reintegrating offenders back into the community.

In some sense in the provincial system, that's probably more important in the long run than the issue of holding people, because of course if you think about it, with the parole laws as they are, the longest time a person is normally going to be serving in a provincial institution is 16 months. Typically they'll be serving much less than that, because as I've already pointed out, the average sentence they're going to be getting is only slightly more than a month.

The issue we're facing is how to use resources effectively, largely to ensure that people are reintegrated into society in a sensible way. I think what we should be doing when we're looking at halfway houses or looking at electronic monitoring is to be looking at the question of where these tools, these methods of reintegration, fit in an overall strategy within the criminal justice system, within corrections.

Ms Dianne Martin: This is my spot to step in.

The next point we make is that after agreeing that we want accountability for people who have committed crimes so that if they've committed a crime there's an effective response, in the context that this is provincially supervised people -- so we're not looking at the penitentiary crowd; we're looking at folks who get very short sentences -- we also have to use the resources we've got wisely. It's now a cliché to remind legislators and the public that imprisonment is costly, but it's important to keep that front and centre, as I suspect the minister did.

It's $125 a day to keep an individual in a provincial institution, and that's a low cost. It doesn't include capital costs, it doesn't include capital improvements, and it doesn't include the loss of a job, nor does it include the increase in social assistance costs the community has to bear. So we're taking the figure of $125 a day and asking ourselves how we use that dollar in a way that holds offenders accountable and improves public safety. This is the point where we perhaps depart somewhat from the recommendation, or what's already occurred, shut halfway houses and put all those dollars -- and enjoy the savings -- into electronic monitoring. We part company there primarily because not everybody in a halfway house is going to be suited to electronic monitoring and not everyone that we might like to put a bracelet on needs the extra supervision a halfway house might have provided. By and large, these are two different categories of offenders, and we may not ultimately be saving any money and we might not ultimately be keeping the community more safe if we fail to recognize that they're a different population.

1540

Just to illustrate how that might work, the halfway house population has I think been overinclusive. I suspect there are folks in halfway houses who didn't need that assistance and could do very nicely in their own homes with a bracelet or perhaps with nothing more than an order to report. That doesn't mean there isn't a significant number of provincially supervised offenders who aren't indeed greatly in need of supervision, and a population that I am concerned about and would ask you to remember are those who are mentally ill. I'm a member of a review board. I meet these folks quite often. They're in and out of the mental health system, and they're in and out of the prison system, and they are fragile and they can be dangerous. They do not have homes or stable residences, they do need assistance in locating such residences, and it doesn't make any sense to leave them out in the community without that assistance. They may be serving a sentence of three or four months, but in that three or four months they could either get settled down into an address or they could get into more trouble.

A different population might be well suited to electronic monitoring if we wanted to use it in a denunciatory way. People who have homes, who have jobs, who have families and who have committed crimes are an interesting problem for the criminal justice system. We don't want to cost them their job unless it's unavoidable, because that costs all of us and it hurts an innocent family. By the same token, if we say, "We'll do nothing to you because you have a job and a family and a stable home," we're not holding people accountable for their crimes. That population, which is not all the folks that are suitable for halfway houses, might very well be suited to electronic monitoring simply as a form of denunciation. It's not even somebody who we need to spend a lot of money supervising, nor do we need to spend a lot of money housing them, but we do, as a community, want to make a statement about their crime -- the bracelet is a statement -- and that population could very well serve their time, bear the stigma of the bracelet and not cost the system anything at all.

That said, we are concerned that this legislation or this regulation and decision might throw the baby out with the bathwater, and those offenders who are very much in need of supervision and can get into some very nasty trouble are being ignored. Again, as an example, the individual who is mentally ill, not to the point of not being responsible for their crime but indeed to the point of being not very able to take care of themselves, could get into a lot of grief, and an electronic bracelet around their ankle isn't going to keep them out of trouble. They're the population that a well-put-together halfway house system could very well serve and perhaps should serve.

That takes us I guess to the final point we wanted to make, which is that this kind of decision works best and most effectively if it's a piece of an overall strategy. One aspect of the minister's statements on the subject that we certainly agree with is the statement that part of the effort to refocus the justice system is to refocus it on serious crime. Tony put that into another context. We take that to mean that this is an opportunity to develop an overall strategy and what the province of Ontario wants to do about the offenders that fall within our jurisdiction, which are of course the least serious offenders.

Dr Doob: What we were suggesting is that this is really one part of it. It's obviously the end part of it, the correctional part of the system. But really the way perhaps to think about it would be to start with the issue of what kinds of charges should be brought to court, what kinds of recommendations the crown should be making in court on sentencing. And really thinking in terms of the crown's responsibility we would suggest would be to think in terms of the total use of resources and to think of how we can accomplish the best we can possibly do with the resources that are available. At the same time, obviously in terms of the principle which we enunciated in the beginning, the crown, in the sense of the government's responsibility, is to consider carefully what kinds of intermediate punishments between doing in effect nothing and putting a person in prison should be made available to the court and what kinds of guidelines might be available for the crown in making those recommendations.

In some sense, what brought us here obviously is the next stage, which is, when people are given sentences of imprisonment, how they might be modified, again so that we can get the most effective reintegration for all of us that we possibly can accomplish, and when one talks about issues specifically like electronic monitoring or halfway houses, what kinds of special groups of people, what kinds of special groups of offenders, are most appropriate for those.

As Dianne said in her comments, the problem we see is really the view that different kinds of intermediate punishments or different ways of dealing with people who are in prison are in some sense interchangeable. Rather than seeing then as interchangeable such that one can easily be substituted for the other, we would suggest that they really are all different means of accomplishing something that we can all agree on, and the question is how one would do that most effectively.

When we were reviewing various things for our presentation today, one of the bits of information that I think stuck with us is that we're spending about a third of a billion dollars in this province locking up people, 70% of whom are not violent offenders. It seemed to us that we should at least see that as a challenge, a challenge on how we would best use that $345 million to accomplish the goals that we can think about, and in that sense we shouldn't close off possibilities; we should be opening up possibilities to see how best we should do that.

We'd be very happy to answer any questions the committee might have.

The Chair: Thank you very much. I guess we'll start with Mr Ramsay.

Mr David Ramsay (Timiskaming): Thank you very much for coming to our committee. We really appreciate having the expertise that you bring to us this afternoon.

Ms Martin, you gave us an example of a type of client you feel might not be the right client for electronic monitoring, and specifically you mentioned those people suffering mental illness. With the approach that this government is taking now by eliminating the halfway houses, what do you see happening to an offender who suffers from mental illness upon their discharge from an institution?

1550

Ms Martin: What happens now and what might happen more in the future is that those individuals end up on the street, often disoriented and sometimes either the target themselves of criminal activity or they become engaged in it again. They are both victims and victimizers often because they can be annoying, they can be troubling, they can even be frightening, and so are often themselves victims of crime, which is a problem, or they end up breaking another window or repeating the cycle.

Mental hospitals are no longer the resource place for such folks, because their aim is to get people out into the community. What we're really doing is giving to the police another almost insoluble problem. They get faced with having to rearrest someone of this sort because no one else will deal with them. That's a revolving door that I think is really very troubling.

This one isn't easy to solve -- I'm not suggesting it's easy to solve -- but we might be making it worse with this step if there aren't any intermediate resources for those folks in particular.

Mr Ramsay: Is there another sort of class of offender that you would see would benefit from a CRC program?

Ms Martin: Oh, yes. The other group that troubles me and needs assistance with housing and with employment is the youthful offender: no longer a young offender under the Young Offenders Act, but an 18- or 19-year-old who is certainly not set in a criminal path but doesn't have a family, for example, doesn't have employment and doesn't have a fixed address.

You can almost see the path branching. Either that young person is going to become committed to more criminal activity or they turn around at this point. Given that they don't have resources of their own -- which doesn't mean that all young people in prison don't have resources; I don't mean that. I mean that of the young people who don't have stable families, they're very vulnerable, and three months in jail is to denounce the conduct. What happens after that three months is what matters and where we can really make a difference or lose them.

Mr Ramsay: I think these examples are very important and it's one of the reasons I wanted to bring this to the attention of the government members. While I don't think anybody in the Legislature is really against electronic monitoring -- I certainly see, as I think most of my colleagues do, there's a place for it in the correctional system -- the problem that many of us are having is with the decision the government made as a total replacement to CRCs and not as one additional community correction tool. I think that's the problem, and you've illustrated that very well here today. I want to emphasize that point. I think it's very, very important that it's a new, modern tool and it should be embraced, but not exclusively to the detriment of the community resource centres we have developed.

Ms Martin: It may be, and I suspect it is, that community resource centres were too full of folks who didn't need to be there. Taking a look at the clientele who was there and saying, "Hey, a goodly number of these folks should be looked after differently," is a logical thing to do, but I think what Tony and I were concerned about is, as I said, tossing the baby out with the bathwater.

Mr Ramsay: Mr Chairman, how many minutes do I have?

The Chair: I'd say you've got one more minute. We have five minutes for each caucus.

Mr Ramsay: The other point you both have made that I think needs to be repeated too is that unfortunately in this jurisdiction we tend to incarcerate far more people than we need to. It's always been my contention that it's the violent people who should be incarcerated, and the non-violent people we need to find other sanctions for. Even though I have a jail in my riding and I think it's under threat, we really have to take a look at the old jail system and make sure we only have the facilities in the province that we require for incarceration and look at all these other both tried-and-true and modern methods of community corrections supervision so that we basically have a variety of programs in place.

The other comment I want to make on what you said about the youth is that it's very important too that some people like the youth need that constant supervision. Where the ministry is saying to us that there are going to be community programs that some people can avail themselves of, you've mentioned a clientele such as youth where just going for two hours maybe three times a week down to the community centre for a job readiness program isn't going to be enough. They need some constant supervision that they would have received in a CRC.

Dr Doob: I'd agree with you. The difficulty is that we have a system which really makes it very easy to put people in prison, and everything else becomes very difficult. The judge can always put somebody in prison, because everybody's eligible for prison, but a certain number of people are eligible for electronic monitoring, a certain number of people, if we had them, would be eligible for halfway houses, for community service orders, for fines, for almost any other sanction. It's almost as if everything kind of drifts towards imprisonment and then we're surprised and upset that we're spending two thirds of our money in the provincial system incarcerating people who aren't really a serious risk to us.

I think that's why we need to address it at a broader level, not just in terms of the other kinds of punishments which are available but also in terms of what we're trying to accomplish overall in the system. It's really this lack of an overall system in which the punishment part shows up very clearly. In the end we end up in the adult system with large numbers of people who we look at and say they don't need to be there. As you know, we do that in the youth system as well.

Mrs Marion Boyd (London Centre): Thank you very much for coming. On the comment about people who might be eligible for CRCs, there's another group that you didn't mention. Those are a group that have great concern from the prison chaplains, and that's the developmentally delayed.

When we read the paper, we frequently hear that many folks who do commit the kinds of crimes for which they'd be sentenced to provincial jails may not understand the consequences of their act to the same extent that others would, and very often they're the ones who are helped particularly in these institutions, I would think.

Ms Martin: I agree. It's a really substantial proportion of those committing minor property offences, for example.

Mrs Boyd: One of the issues we've talked a little bit about with the other jurisdictions that we've dealt with is this whole issue you raise about sentencing. Certainly, having worked with provincial judges, one of the things that upsets them quite frequently is that they have little control over the decisions that are made about the type of incarceration that occurs. You're suggesting that it probably would be important for a judge to be able to order this type of temporary absence. Very often they may order it, but they certainly tell me frequently or have told me frequently that their order means nothing because once they're in corrections' care, corrections makes that decision.

We heard yesterday from the gentleman who was talking from Florida that in fact that program, although it was not intended for violent offenders, has expanded to include violent offenders, the community control program, because of plea bargain arrangements and because of the orders of judges.

I guess all of that arouses great apprehension, both sides of this, about whether we want judges to be able to make that decision, and on what basis there would have to be a pre-sentence report that did the risk management scheme that the ministry is proposing and so on.

I just wondered if we could have some comments from you on that.

Dr Doob: I was recently in British Columbia speaking to the judges there, and one of the people on the same panel as me was a person from the Ministry of the Attorney General in British Columbia who is responsible for their electronic monitoring program.

The committee might be interested in getting some of the information they have, but my understanding was that in most instances their people on electronic monitoring were all being released on temporary absence passes. But the mechanism for that was the person being sent to prison for a certain period of time -- I don't remember exactly what the range was -- but the judge saying in the order that he recommends the offender for electronic monitoring. Prior to doing that, there seemed to be an understanding and a cooperation between the probation service and the judges that they had done the screening so it was understood that this was somebody who was appropriate for it, that there was equipment available, that the home was appropriate and so on. The work had been done as part of the pre-sentence report. A focused pre-sentence report which would allow that would presumably be effective from everybody's perspective.

I think it can be done. The difficulty obviously to some extent is a jurisdictional one such that the province can't really create this as a new disposition, but certainly there would be nothing which would go against judges being allowed to make these recommendations or encouraged to make these recommendations with the advice of the probation officer.

1600

Mrs Boyd: It seems to me that with Bill C-41 coming in with the conditional sentence issue clearly having to be put in front of judges and their having to deal with how they are going to sentence, given the conditional sentence, combining this whole matter of eligibility for electronic monitoring and on what basis and that sort of thing would make sense at the same time.

Dr Doob: My impression from some of the discussions I've had with the judges in jurisdictions that do a lot of electronic monitoring is that it was interesting that they saw those as somewhat different. It may well be that because they were so used to electronic monitoring they saw this as an additional process.

But I think you're right, that what's happening under Bill C-41 is that the number of options is opening up. Really what I would strongly urge the committee to think about would be the possibility of using C-41 as yet another opportunity to look at how these correctional resources are being used and to try to use them effectively. Each time the federal government changes the law, we tend to see that as a new challenge to deal with in one way or another, but one approach to it would be to say, "Let's use Bill C-41." There are some changes in it which can be used because people should be seeing this as a new system of sentencing with some new principles written in.

Mr Ron Johnson (Brantford): I want to thank both of you for your presentation. I'm somewhat encouraged to hear you say that of course we have to look at ways we can best use our resources within corrections. I want to ask you one question about other sorts of things that are being used and are being looked at, because it seems to me that as a government we're far better off to make a better use of our resources, get out of the bricks and mortar business and get into programs which provide the core services we require. I look at electronic monitoring as one of those. I look at diversion programs as a possibility. I look at things like the CRAs, community residential agreements, which, as you know, provide specialty needs, for example, for drug and alcohol treatment facilities, young offenders, young female offenders, that sort of thing. I want to get your feedback on those particular types of programs and whether or not those would fill the void that you seem to believe we would be creating if we strictly went to that type of program and got out of the traditional form of corrections.

Ms Martin: We could both probably talk about that. I think this is an opportunity. It was a startling move. It may have caused some individual harm -- I suspect it has, and that part troubles me -- to individual offenders, but it is an opportunity. Certainly the greatest possible saving to corrections is to shut a prison down, is to say that institution costs a fortune, is not keeping us safe, is keeping folks for a month and six weeks at a time. We know very well that isn't doing anything except disrupting some lives and producing perhaps the need for more bricks and mortar.

This opportunity is therefore one to look at those options, because I think those are good ones, and even others. There are jurisdictions in the world -- New Zealand is one, Australia another -- that are doing a great deal of work with victim-offender reconciliation. The police run these programs. They're engaged in the program and committed to it. If it's your program, you're committed to it. There are many creative ways a community can find to reconcile the offender and his victim. That doesn't have to cost any of us very much money and can make those people who are victims of crime feel very much better and also do something about the offender.

I would strongly urge taking this opportunity to think about shutting some prisons and think about doing it in a way that makes use of a broad strategy of correctional options. The ones you've named are very good ones, and I'd add more. Around the world, there are some tremendously creative responses and solutions to crime. We don't need to be narrow and provincial about how we respond.

Mr Ron Johnson: Exactly. I'm encouraged to hear you say that, because we as a government look at this as an opportunity as well to explore all the different options that governments of the past have completely shut out and decided to ignore. We're committed to exploring all of the options, and those are some of the ones I mention. I know there are others that are being looked at. I thank you for your input.

The Chair: Professor Doob and Professor Martin, we appreciate your assistance today. Thank you very much.

PROBATION OFFICERS ASSOCIATION OF ONTARIO

The Chair: The Probation Officers Association of Ontario, Ms Lori Santamaria. Welcome to the justice committee. We have a written brief and we have one half-hour which will include all questions. I'd ask that you proceed with your presentation.

Ms Lori Santamaria: First of all, thank you very much for providing the Probation Officers Association of Ontario with the opportunity to address the standing committee on administration of justice. My name is Lori Santamaria. I'm a director on the provincial executive of the Probation Officers Association of Ontario. My portfolio is that of the director of protocol, which means that my primary responsibility is to focus on policy. I'm employed by the Ministry of the Solicitor General and Correctional Services. I'm a probation and parole officer and my expertise is in the area of parole.

First of all, I would like to provide a brief overview of the association. We were established in 1954. Our members consist of probation and parole officers who are employed by the Ministry of the Solicitor General and Correctional Services as well as the Ministry of Community and Social Services. We have associate members from different parts of the criminal justice system who also are interested parties. Our focus is on the professionalism of probation and parole, primarily on policy and issues that impact on our membership.

In respect to providing the committee with a written submission, I have provided an agenda. Given the time frame of this meeting, a policy paper could not be completed. However, POAO believes in and supports community-based corrections where supervision and reintegration are the focus.

In January 1996, POAO requested written information on the electronic monitoring program and further requested to be included in the review process. The Ministry of the Solicitor General and Correctional Services will be completing a comprehensive review of the electronic monitoring program in the future, and POAO's interest in participating in that process is to be considered.

The first area I'd like to discuss is the implementation of the electronic monitoring program in Ontario. This program did not have a lot of time to be implemented. As a result, some say the electronic monitoring program was not well-thought-out. This program is not new in Ontario. It had been studied and reviewed through pilot projects in the 1980s and it was deemed not to be an appropriate alternative to incarceration at that time.

The second area I'm going to touch on is policy and purpose. The electronic monitoring program was introduced as a program to enhance reintegration by replacing community resource centres. This is not entirely true, as programming is no longer the focus. The electronic monitoring program does not include the community and in fact isolates the offenders. The short-term savings are not considered to be a benefit, given that the electronic monitoring program does not address reducing risk factors that lead to reoffending.

The criteria are the next area. The criteria for being accepted into the electronic monitoring program have received the most criticism. The mission statement of the electronic monitoring program is to "select inmates who meet the criteria for the ECTAP" -- that's the extended custody temporary absence program -- "but are deemed to require an added level of monitoring and structure to qualify for conditional release"; in other words, focus on diverting those offenders out of custody where appropriate. However, what is happening is that electronic monitoring participants who are being selected are the same offenders who would have been eligible for the temporary absence program; the extended custody temporary absence program, ECTAP; as well as the alternative custody program. In fact, the electronic monitoring participants are often released on temporary absence after being on electronic monitoring. The savings, therefore, are questioned. What are the setup costs for that?

1610

Also, the same offenders who previously would have been released on the temporary absence program now have to meet even stricter criteria. The criteria are based on the offence. There are no level 1 offences -- I'm sure you're familiar with level 1 offences -- that are current level 1 offences or in the past five years; they have to have a low LSI-OR score -- that's a level of supervision inventory-(Ontario revision), a tool we use -- they have to have a minimum 180-day sentence; they have to have a home to go to and a telephone. These criteria are very restrictive if you look at the type of people we serve.

Community support does not play as large a role in the selection process if you compare it to parole per se. The question everybody is asking is, what is the cost to implement and maintain a program for so few offenders?

Finally, electronic monitoring programs are institutionally based and there is a perception that bias can play a role as superintendents have influence or discretion in respect to participation in the program. Some people criticize, saying that bed counts therefore can generate more or less participation in the program.

Supervision is the next area. This is an area of concern for the Probation Officers Association of Ontario. The POAO and the employers of the probation officers and probation and parole officers in this province, the Ministry of the Solicitor General and Correctional Services and the Ministry of Community and Social Services, all define supervision to include monitoring enforcement, but supervision also means establishing a supervision plan which requires objectives and measurable goals. This is achieved through programming and/or referrals.

Access to programming and community referrals is dwindling. Therefore, probation officers and probation and parole officers are increasingly expected to be engaged in the supervision plan. Probation officers are degreed professionals whose area of expertise is supervision, yet electronic monitoring officers are deemed the case supervisors. As case supervisors, they do not require degrees and do not receive the training probation officers receive, yet they are directed to provide supervision. It has been suggested that electronic monitoring officers provide surveillance and not supervision, again especially as programming is not part of the electronic monitoring program.

Looking at electronic monitoring versus CRCs, community resource centres, the electronic monitoring program does not provide for unemployed candidates returning to the community on supervised job search, which CRCs would allow them to do. Given the current economy, this is an issue. It is an issue because unemployment is a factor in offending behaviour. Economically driven criminogenic behaviours need to be altered through acquiring work or skills. The electronic monitoring program encourages homelessness, in that CRCs could assist those without homes to be placed within the community prior to their release and assist in developing skills such as accessing resources before they are actually released into the community.

Integration of familial relationships that were affected and perhaps damaged through criminal behaviour would normally have been assisted through the support staff of the community resource centres and the referrals would benefit in the community. This is true especially for domestic violence cases. Slow integration and supervised programming were components of community resource centres. This is no longer available.

CRCs also assisted with self-sufficiency, providing life skills training and management of crises before things became problematic. Community resource centres and their staff were also able to provide early identification of adjustment difficulties, early detection of relapse into alcohol and drug use, early detection of return to criminogenic behaviour and relapse prevention training. The population served by the electronic monitoring program is so restrictive that these individuals may not require the assistance I previously noted, but such a stable population of offenders have a lower risk of reoffending in the first place.

The population that was served by CRCs now has little opportunity for a release program that can assist in addressing lowering risk factors, which is what we're all about. This is where costs are saved because the chances of return to custody are reduced.

The community and victims' feelings are not considered so much in this program. Victims know it is difficult enough to get satisfactory jail sentences, let alone having the offender go home on electronic monitoring. Community resource centres also provide a public education for communities where NIMBY syndrome was in existence -- not in my backyard -- and they were able to overcome that syndrome. The federal government has found that halfway houses are effective and valuable. It is my experience that CRCs were also effective and valuable.

Electronic monitoring versus parole is the next area we're moving into. An objective of the electronic monitoring program is to provide an alternative to other costly forms of supervision. Without having any figures available, it's assumed that parole is more cost-efficient and serves a larger population. It appears that parole and the electronic monitoring program are in competition and we're not sure why. Supervision with parole is better as there is face-to-face contact with the supervisor and the conditions of release assist with reintegration, as does the programming. Electronic monitoring participants are credited for good time while they're at home, yet parolees are not allowed this privilege. The optics are not as good as electronic monitoring because it's a better deal for inmates, and I'm not sure the community likes that type of optic. The criteria for applying for parole includes collecting information and data that go beyond the requirement of that electronic monitoring, and there is no community input such as police and community board members.

In conclusion, it is premature to discredit the electronic monitoring program as the numbers are not yet available. It is understood that the cost of the electronic monitoring program are great, especially as the population that's served is small and that programming is not a component of electronic monitoring. Without programming, criminogenic behaviour is not altered and we need to think about what are the economics of continued imprisonment.

Finally, instead of looking into replacing alternative programs for custody, consideration should be given to having several options available. This is especially true given the introduction of Bill C-41, conditional release, which will be introduced in September 1996. Electronic monitoring has a population to serve, community resource centres had a population to serve, and parole has a population to serve. Alternatives to custody need to focus on matching offenders to the program best suited for them. Suitability means reducing risk factors and reoffending behaviour and thus preventing higher costs of future incarceration.

The Chair: Thank you very much. Could you just tell me the number of probation officers in your association?

Ms Santamaria: Today's count I'm not positive on. Generally, we're around 300, just around 300.

The Chair: Thank you very much. Each caucus has approximately six minutes and we'll start with the third party. Yes, Ms Boyd.

Mrs Boyd: I'm sorry. I thought you were starting with Mr Ramsay, as you have all along. I beg your pardon; I wasn't even paying attention.

The Chair: No, we're going to change.

Mrs Boyd: Thank you very much. You're all right? You get the last word this way, David.

Thank you for coming and for giving your perspective. I wanted to go back to this issue around supervision. Do I understand that your concern is that those who would be doing the supervision under electronic monitoring would not have the same level of training and expertise that probation and parole officers have?

Ms Santamaria: Yes. I guess our concern is not so much even that, but in that the way the word "supervision" is used. My understanding, from the directive of the way the program is set out, is that it looks more like surveillance. It's just that supervision is supposed to be including counselling and programming, and that's not available. That is our concern, yes.

Mrs Boyd: And is it your concern that not having that available resource, the community resource centre, that there are going to be -- and I think your words were "numbers of people who would have to be maintained in jail" because they would never be eligible for electronic monitoring, because of either not having a home or not having any of the supports that are seen as being important to the electronic monitoring program?

Ms Santamaria: Yes, including a telephone. Maybe to everybody in this room a telephone is pretty much a standard thing, but it's not for most of our clients. The same people who are in jails become our clients on probation or parole, and phones are not that common.

1620

Mrs Boyd: No, simply because of the income that they have and the circumstances in which they find themselves. If some of the concerns that you're raising around the level of supervision and around the criteria that are applied could be resolved -- has your association taken a position that is absolutely opposed under any circumstances to electronic monitoring, or are you saying that you're just really concerned about the way in which it's being introduced, the notion that it's being introduced as an alternative or as the only alternative to community resource centres? Can you clarify that for us?

Ms Santamaria: Yes, that's exactly true. No, we haven't taken a stance on being against electronic monitoring; that's not the case. There is a population that it can serve. Unfortunately, it's a smaller population than community resource centres can serve, and that is where our concern is. There are levels of offenders who respond very well to parole, who did respond very well to community resource centres, and there are, I'm sure, going to be lots of people who respond very well to electronic monitoring. It's just that as a replacement to community resource centres and as the only alternative, and appearing to be in competition with parole, that becomes a concern because they all have benefits.

Mrs Boyd: I'm not sure that you were here when I asked the question of Professor Doob and Professor Martin, but the risk assessment instrument that you mention, because you represent probation and parole officers you're used to the pre-sentence report routine. Do you use that instrument in terms of risk assessment for a pre-sentence report and do you think it is the kind of fail-safe that should be there in the system, that this be done before the sentencing process to ensure that risk assessment has been done and that the appropriate sentence is suggested by the crown?

Ms Santamaria: You want to know if the level of supervision inventory-OR should be used prior to a pre-sentence report?

Mrs Boyd: Yes.

Ms Santamaria: Yes, there's benefit to it. The association again -- we support the LSI and the revisions to it. We were involved in that and we're happy with some of the revisions. It's more reflective. Some POs do do it as a matter of course, but it becomes almost second nature that those are the areas you identify anyway. Whether you actually sit down and score the form or not, it's second nature to know what areas you should be alerted to. So, yes, it is definitely a good tool. But the only problem with the way the new LSI-OR was introduced is that it's supposed to be a tool, and unfortunately the way the electronic monitoring program is written up, it says, "With a low score," and it doesn't allow for that discretion. Low scores do not always mean what they appear to mean. It's common knowledge that sex offenders generally score very low because all the other criminogenic behaviours are not the same; they have one specific area so their score stays low. So to be locked into a score is dangerous, but the new tool is to allow us to not be locked into that and looking at other offending behaviours.

Mrs Boyd: Although it's in the level 1 offences, so there is a bit of a fail-safe.

Ms Santamaria: Yes, that's right. Sex offenders wouldn't be eligible anyway.

Mr Ron Johnson: I want to thank you very much for your presentation. You indicated earlier in your presentation that you felt the criteria to release offenders on electronic monitoring were too restrictive. Can you just clarify that for me, please?

Ms Santamaria: Okay. I know it sounds a little contradictory. On one hand I'm saying it's too restrictive and yet saying that some people might not see electronic monitoring being a good thing, for people to go out to communities so quickly. It's just that it's restrictive in that -- again, I don't have numbers or stats available, but knowing what I know from the years of experience and the people I supervise who have been in jail, the criteria are level 1 offences are not eligible, which makes common sense given that they're higher risk, but they also couldn't have had a level 1 offence in the last five years, I believe it says; they must have a minimum of 180 days' sentence, which is I believe a little bit longer than the average stay; they also have to have a telephone; they also have to have a home. And those criteria combined, not individually but combined, make the population that you're going to be able to serve much smaller. On their own they all have merit but, again, together it becomes more restrictive.

Mr Ron Johnson: It would seem to me, and I wouldn't mind hearing your position on this, that one of the reasons that it is restrictive is in the interests of public safety, in that obviously you don't want offenders on this type of program who could pose any sort of threat at all with respect to public safety and that's why I think it is this restrictive.

Give me your thoughts on that and give me your thoughts with respect to the type of individuals -- if in fact they didn't meet that particular criteria, what parts of that could, in your opinion, be loosened up to allow possibly more people on to the electronic monitoring?

Ms Santamaria: Like I said, there is a population that would benefit from electronic monitoring, and yes, there has to be criteria because you don't want people just going in, being sentenced and walking out the next day. They need to be a low-risk offender. My point is that that's a small percentage of the people who are sentenced.

Our issue, I guess, is more the fact that there's a whole other lot who need to be served and could be served outside of a jail setting but they need somewhere to go. They just wouldn't necessarily be appropriate for electronic monitoring because they need programming, they need the assistance of making that slow transition back into the community. Where I'm saying "restrictive," it's because there are just not as many people who qualify. In all due respect, there should be definitely strict criteria for the program.

Mr Ron Johnson: I know that even as recently as a few moments ago, electronic monitoring was being touted as the only alternative to community resource centres. The concern I have with respect to that is, we are looking at -- for example, in a diversion program, CRAs are obviously in use today, and this is the question I posed to the previous presenter, and will in fact all of this combined provide the necessary facilities with respect to taking care of offenders? Does that meet the needs that you see out there, encompassing a lot of the people you say would be outside of the restrictions that we impose for electronic monitoring and could fall within one of the other programs? I guess that's the question I'd like you to address.

Ms Santamaria: Yes, they could be, but again, I'm not -- you're saying CRAs in terms of --

Mr Ron Johnson: Specialized programming for alcohol abuse, young offenders, those sort of things.

Ms Santamaria: Those people generally are placed on probation to attend those type of programs or are already in diversion. Our position on this is that these are people who have been sentenced to jail and that's why they're not being served as well, because there's just not as much at that level.

In terms of anything in the community, in programming, the different alcohol-related, drinking-and-driving programs, that's usually a part of probation, but again, we're looking at trying to see if there's any way we can complement the system through having access to various programs and not just replacing one program with another, because they aren't equivalent. They're completely different and they meet different needs for different individuals.

Mr Ramsay: Thank you very much for coming this afternoon. I'd just like to comment, first of all, on what Mr Johnson just said. He was saying that people are implying that electronic monitoring is being touted as a replacement to the CRCs. The reason that is, is of course, they came together in the minister's announcement that he was closing 25 community resource centres throughout Ontario and was going to accelerate the use of electronic monitoring as a replacement. So it's the minister who has joined these two issues together and it's why we bring this to this committee, where we think electronic monitoring is fine in its application, if it's done properly, but so are community resource centres, and I know you've made that point.

One of the points that I wanted to emphasize that you had made, that I thought was really excellent and really brings home what electronic monitoring is, you said that basically, as we started out with our pilot, electronic monitoring is centred out of the institutions and they're not P&P officers who are supervising this but correction officers from the institutions. So really what we have here is another type of incarceration. In the States they call it house arrest, but that's what it is, and that's fine; I agree with doing some of that. But what's missing is a lot of the intensive supervision and the programming that would have been supplied by a CRC, and I think that's the point that you make that is very valid. You mentioned things like supervised job searches that are very important, programs for people who come out, just like my colleague said, who maybe don't even have a phone, let alone a job or a place to stay, and it's that transition time under supervision that gives the offender that chance to reintegrate into society and I think that's the point that the government members are missing and you've brought that forward.

I think my colleague might have some questions, so I'll go to her.

1630

Ms Annamarie Castrilli (Downsview): I was impressed by what you set out as four principal functions of CRCs; that is, early detection of difficulties, prevention, public education and behaviour altering. I think that's something that's very useful for us to have on the record. Those are things that of course electronic monitoring will not address at all.

I'm wondering if you could tell me what kind of clients typically you would find in a halfway house, how many -- clients, I use generic words.

Ms Santamaria: That's what we call them.

Ms Castrilli: What the length of stay is, if you know that, and perhaps how often they reoffend while they're in CRCs, if they in fact do.

Ms Santamaria: In terms of the statistics, the length of stay and how often they reoffend, I don't have them available. My caseload that I deal with is mainly parolees and I also have a caseload that we call probation following incarceration. So anybody who wasn't eligible for parole because they may not have had a place to go, they would often go into a CRC and then come out on probation. With those people I worked with, they've done really well. In fact, they often will stay in contact with the staff at the community resource centre, to continue to go to meetings. I've had people go there and bring them lunch and what not. They develop a bond with those people and always know they're available. How long they stay for, like I said, I don't know. I just know that the ones I have had who have gone through have done really, really well and they wouldn't have done well otherwise and they would have been too high a risk for parole.

Just going back to the point about having a home available, that's one thing parole has never been able to address because it's impossible, unless of course you set up parole houses. You have to have a residence to go to if you want to apply for parole. So CRCs were able to catch that group, and again, it helps them find a place to live, and it's accessing resources, teaching people how to access resources. For some of us, it may be easy to pick up a book and go through and figure it out, but for a lot of people we work with, it's not. That's just the way it is. Part of our role as support in the community and part of the justice system is to teach that. That is something we need to do and we do that as probation and parole officers; but again, without having that link to the community, that's missing. Again, electronic monitoring is fine for the population that it's appropriate for, but then we have a whole band of people who are not being served.

The Chair: Thank you. Our time is up and we'll move on to the next person. I thank you for attending today.

ONTARIO ASSOCIATION OF COMMUNITY CORRECTIONAL RESIDENCES

The Chair: Ontario Association of Community Correctional Residences, Joan Winchell, president, and Arthur Stratton, member. Welcome to the justice committee. Our procedure is that we have one half-hour. Hopefully, that'll be taken up by your presentation and then each caucus has the opportunity to ask questions of clarification. Excuse me, just one moment. Did you have a question of the staff that you wanted to clarify now or could that be done later?

Mrs Boyd: I think at the end of the testimony would be fine, Chair, thank you.

The Chair: If you would proceed, then.

Ms Joan Winchell: Good afternoon and thank you for providing us with the opportunity to appear before the standing committee on justice. I am Joan Winchell, the president of the association, and this is Arthur Stratton, a colleague of mine and a member of the association. The OACCR is a province-wide organization representing adult halfway houses and phase II open custody residences in Ontario.

The closure of Ontario's halfway houses in October last year was the culmination of several rumours which had been circulating over the summer. Despite repeated attempts by our association to consult with the ministry, both as an individual entity and as part of an Ontario coalition group, no acknowledgement was received to our repeated requests until after the closures were announced, actually in November.

Halfway houses in Ontario have existed over 20 years as a quasi-legislated service. I say "quasi" because although the actual service is not mandated, the policies for dealing with inmates or clients -- your preference -- including the handling of room-and-board dollars, for instance, are clearly stated within the legislation. There has always been the acknowledgement within the spirit of the law that community residential care of inmates played an important part in the Ontario justice system. The underutilization in the placement of low-risk, low-need offenders in halfway houses was an issue that our association had been focusing on for some time, particularly in the last two or three years.

Community services providers have repeatedly addressed these concerns with the ministry through participation in several study groups, the most recent one being the community residential services review, which took place from September 1991 to early 1993. This study focused on the utilization rates in halfway houses, client profiles, efficiencies and effectiveness of services, including the use of community knowledge and expertise, in the continuum of care. I am sorry to report that no change or progress has ever resulted from this study, not due to the lack of interest or commitment by the community groups involved, but the ministry had other priorities at the time. I offer these insights in order to reinforce the fact that community agencies in Ontario have long realized the need to stay vital and current in order to provide efficient and effective service.

The association hesitates to fully support electronic monitoring, although we firmly believe there is a portion of offenders that this particular alternative to incarceration will serve, but we feel very strongly that it can only work when other community-supported programs are in place. Several Canadian jurisdictions, including Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and British Columbia, report ongoing success of electronic monitoring when coupled with residential services, when required. Even Florida research, as you heard yesterday in the presentation, indicates a higher success rate when halfway houses are part of the continuum of care for offenders.

The Ontario revision of the LSI has resulted in criteria for release which will severely limit the number of eligible participants, as you've heard from the POAO its concerns, and it's also one of ours. While we recognize the necessity for this instrument and applaud its redevelopment, the association is also concerned that this instrument will result in a higher-than-normal failure rate, therefore increased reincarceration of offenders. That's increasing costs to the Ontario taxpayer.

Electronic monitoring may appear to be the least expensive alternative in the moment, but when the true costs, including supervision, the reincarceration of offenders who have breached conditions of electronic monitoring and the increase in the institutional population due to restrictive TAP policies, as well as electronic monitoring policies, are finally known, will the results reflect the present assumptions; that is, will this policy result in the planned savings of approximately $7 million?

We fully embrace the fact that limited resources in Ontario are forcing a realignment of priorities. We acknowledge that the placement of low-risk, low-need offenders in halfway houses is not the most efficient use of resources. But I will add that public opinion, ministry policy and the perceived fear of crime have had a direct impact on risk management. That in turn has an impact on utilization rates in halfway houses.

One could argue for hours, but suffice to say that the closure of these houses has left a huge gap in the provision of service for offenders in Ontario. How can we effectively reduce recidivism without a full range of options, which North American research clearly indicates is necessary to be truly effective in crime prevention? We are encouraged to note that the community corrections strategy for Ontario is not fully developed at this time. This presents an opportunity for volunteer-based community agencies to be involved in the development of this strategy. We, the community experts, are eager and enthusiastic, and look forward to participating in planning for a more effective and efficient justice system in Ontario.

It is also encouraging to note that the ministry's consultative committee is to be reborn at the end of May. This will hopefully be the jumping-off point for further community involvement. Communities in Ontario have a responsibility and a right to be involved in crime prevention and the reduction of recidivism. Volunteers developed community corrections and we, as both volunteers and professionals, insist on remaining involved in order to make our communities safer places to live.

1640

The Vice-Chair (Mr Ron Johnson): Thank you very much. We'll move now to questions. Each caucus has about five or six minutes and we'll start with the Conservative caucus.

Mr Ed Doyle (Wentworth East): Thank you for coming today, I appreciate it. Yesterday's Florida brief -- one of the figures they gave -- it was a little hard to hear their presentation because of the phone line quality. Unless I got these figures wrong because of a bad line, I understand there are some 15,000 people on house arrest in Florida -- I believe that was the figure he gave -- and only 1,000 of these people were on electronic monitoring. I'm wondering if you could give us your views on those types of figures and their implication.

Ms Winchell: Not being fully familiar, and not being the least bit familiar with their criteria for electronic monitoring, if it is more restrictive than Ontario's criteria or least restrictive, my immediate read on it would be that they probably are taking more advantage of their halfway house system that's already in place and using that as treatment and supervision for possibly what we would refer to as level 1 offenders.

Mr Doyle: Most of the witnesses have said, of course, that they believe there is room for electronic monitoring. I'm wondering if you could expand on that and give us your views on that and how you feel it can best be used.

Ms Winchell: The association certainly feels there is a place in the continuum of care for electronic monitoring in the province of Ontario. Our concern, and it was reiterated in questions prior to my speaking, was that electronic monitoring will never serve the same population that community resource centres served. It's just a different level of inmate; it's a different need; it's a different population altogether. For instance, in the federal system in Canada it's quite often used for high-risk, high-need offenders when they are released from halfway houses, as a continuing monitoring of their success in the community. I think our concern about it being used at the front end -- I can see it if 50% of the sentences in Ontario are less than 30 days; why aren't we using it at that end? There's a whole segment of our population there that could be best served without being incarcerated at all. Perhaps that's where the application needs to be studied more than actually applying it and then at the end of a sentence or near the end of a sentence -- the problem is that I'm in and out of institutions on a regular basis and the criteria are so restrictive that the number of people applying is very, very low.

Mr Doyle: Thank you very much.

Ms Winchell: You're very welcome.

Mr John L. Parker (York East): If I understand your submission fully, what you're saying is that electronic monitoring has its place but it doesn't do everything that a CRC does, and the CRC does certain good things that we shouldn't lose track of. Can you just describe briefly what those things are?

Ms Winchell: I'll start to answer you and then I'll pass this to Arthur because he actually was a director of a CRC so he's very familiar with the process. It probably provides, to reiterate what the POAO representative said, a structured environment that facilitates reintegration. We look at reintegration, and in order to be successful it has to be done on a gradual basis. CRCs are monitored in order to allow that gradual --

Mr Parker: I don't want to cut you off, but I just want to get some clarity. How gradual are we talking about? We're dealing here with people who are just incarcerated for a short period of time.

Ms Winchell: Yes. Normally what happens is that a person comes in and spends at least 48 hours within a residence, as a minimum, to establish sort of a pattern; to confirm their employment, to confirm their residence, all those kinds of things. An initial assessment is always done within 48 hours to see what the needs of the offender are, where the supports need to be, whether it's counselling, whether it's in the community, whether it's in a house. It provides a very structured environment. They're assigned a case worker; the job search begins.

Mr Parker: Is there no way of performing that service other than through a CRC?

Ms Winchell: There are other ways of performing it. The problem is that a great number of the people who end up on parole or probation in CRCs do not have alternatives. They don't have housing, they don't have permanent jobs, which the parole board would see as criteria for release. Unless they're applying to come to a CRC, for instance, where they begin to establish that pattern in their community, they're not eligible for parole. That backs up into the system, so that forces up the rate of incarceration, and at $140 a day, or $120 a day on average, that's very expensive.

Mr Parker: What's the average length of stay in a CRC?

Mr Arthur Stratton: The average length of stay would be about six weeks. However, that doesn't mean the individual is serving a short sentence. At our facility here in Toronto the average length of sentence was about 180 days. We have to look at the provincial average but we also have to look at some of the hot spots in the province. Maybe we didn't need 25 CRCs in the province. Maybe we don't need 400 EM bracelets; maybe we only need 200. Maybe we didn't need 25 CRCs but maybe we do need five, 10 or 15, based upon how many individuals are currently in the system who need that level of attention, that level of care.

Mr Parker: Are there cases where the kind of service you're describing could be provided adequately outside a CRC?

Mr Stratton: Today, no, because of all the cuts that we've seen. Just to clarify, one of the purposes of the CRC is almost a bridging. We've seen a lot of division between community and social services, housing, health, corrections. They tended to work independently. The CRCs were able to link clients with the community, were able to bridge between the different ministries. As soon as they leave our door, leave the control of corrections, it doesn't mean all their problems have gone away. They're going to be on Comsoc's or health's or someone else's doorstep. We were trying to identify in CRCs where the needs were and whom we can link them up with; otherwise they're going to fall in the gaps.

Mr Ramsay: Joan, thank you very much for coming. We appreciate both of you making your presentation. We have people come before us and sometimes we sound like a broken record, but each different presentation gives us new insight as to the need for a place for CRCs. I thank you for admitting that the number 25 might not have been the right number. You're willing to admit that and say, "Let's look at what the system needs." What we're very concerned about is the arbitrary decision the minister made, "There shall not be any CRCs in Ontario," and bang, with the stroke of a pen even broke into some contracts to eliminate them.

On this point of supervision, for some people coming right out of jail, being under house arrest at home, even though they maybe have to go for a couple of hours a few times a week to some program in the community, doesn't really give them the intensive supervision that might be required in that circumstance, whereas for a lot of people, possibly electronic monitoring suits them very well. I think the case needs to be made that not all the clients you serve and whom the system serves are the same. They deserve different approaches.

One question I have for you is your difficulty in accepting the ministry's cost of about $5 a day, $4 a day, for this. You cite examples of Newfoundland and British Columbia, I think it was, of $50 and $45. What accounts for the difference in the cost of those systems and what Ontario is saying it can do it for? Why are they saying it's going to be so cheap here?

Ms Winchell: In the preparation of the brief, the difference was that the $5 accounted for equipment only. It doesn't at this time account for supervision or feeding into community programming or any costs associated with that. With the fee-for-service structure now taking place in Ontario, it's going to become more of an issue, I think.

1650

Mr Ramsay: Okay, and that's because they've just got this built-in cost to the institution because one of the COs at the institution, on a rotating basis, will just sit down by the machine every so many hours a shift, I suppose, and make the calls or whatever, so that's not being budgeted into the program.

Ms Winchell: Right.

Ms Castrilli: I was impressed with the figures you present on page 2 and page 7. You indicate, as you have stated, that the average sentence for provincial offences is somewhere between 52 and 79 days, and yet the average sentence length in at least one halfway house is 173 days, six months, which sounds to me like these are more violent, more serious, riskier offenders than you would otherwise find in prison. These are the people we're now looking to monitor electronically. I wonder what your thoughts are about how effective this is going to be in terms of society's security overall and the eventual cost to society of just putting these people on electronic monitoring.

Mr Stratton: Security of society will occur for the length of the sentence, because the individuals who were in -- I speak for my program here in the city -- will not be eligible for electronic monitoring. During the last year, approximately 38% of the residents in my program were level 1 offences. As a result, they will not be eligible for electronic monitoring. Therefore, they will be serving their entire sentence in an institution at a cost: increased safety to the community only for the length of the sentence, then upon release you've got a more angry, frustrated, confused individual who has none of his needs or problems met. Now we lose the safety and we get into more danger to the community because of his release.

Ms Castrilli: You would also have a higher cost, wouldn't you, for the 173 days if this individual is kept in a facility as opposed to on electronic monitoring?

Mr Stratton: Virtually twice the cost, yes.

Ms Castrilli: Just one final question: You've done a great job of comparing some of the programs in various jurisdictions, and I commend you for that. Are you aware of any jurisdiction that has eliminated CRCs altogether, and if so, have they done it effectively?

Ms Winchell: As far as I'm aware, Ontario is the only one.

Mrs Boyd: Thank you very much for coming to share your expertise with us. Yesterday Margaret Stanowski was here, and one of the issues that arose was the same one you raised, that there were people who might have been put in CRCs who were not appropriate for them. There was a little bit of misunderstanding about whether that meant they were a danger to the community or whether they were no danger to the community and should never have been incarcerated in the first place. Would you like to comment on that?

Ms Winchell: There is an increasing concern that there are more special needs within the correctional environment than there ever have been before. The closure of psychiatric beds across the province, with access to psychiatric services becoming very limited, particularly in the greater Toronto area and our multiculturalism, our English-as-a-second-language difficulties around job searches and those kinds of things, is making it more and more difficult. Although we're very pleased to see that there are 59 CRA beds left open in the province to serve those special needs, I don't think those numbers are adequate. It won't begin to answer the need we're going to have in an overcrowded situation.

Mrs Boyd: The estimate was close to 400 people who were removed abruptly from the CRCs, put back in prison -- one wonders -- or just let out on the street without warning, one's not quite sure. Those 400 beds suddenly added to the complement of overcrowded prisons is really quite a scary thought, particularly when we know we're not seeing lower numbers of sentence. We're seeing a public demand which obviously, over time, impacts on the whole criminal justice system around probably longer sentences than might have been true otherwise.

The real issue in terms of public safety, one of the issues that obviously needs to be addressed, is that we are not necessarily better served by longer sentences. What we need to do is sort out for whom longer sentences are required and for whom they're not. It seems to me that at the provincial level, for the vast majority of people the whole issue of incarceration as opposed to some form of community corrections, from residences right down to electronic monitoring to community service, may be more appropriate, and that really is the challenge.

The auditor's report, for example -- I think some of you responded to that -- around the issue of parole is a similar kind of thing. If we're telling the parole board quite clearly that we don't want people paroled, then what are we going to do with them, and how are we going to do that transition to the community without the resources that were there? The auditor was basing his report on having those resources there, not on not having them. Would you like to comment on that end of it?

Ms Winchell: Several years ago there was a large study undertaken by the government and by what was the Ministry of Corrections at that time which had to do with the justice review project. I 'm sure you're familiar with it, Marion. Part of that study was to look at the concentration of limited resources within the environment, the combination of all justice administration and justice ministries across the province. It looked at young offenders, it looked at adults and it looked at special-needs cases. The study has never been released to the public. The last I heard it had gotten stalled somewhere along the system. There is serious concern by the volunteers who sit on my board of directors and by the thousands of volunteers who sit on boards of directors across the province about how we're going to handle the influx of the numbers on the criminal justice system.

We're concerned about overcrowding within institutions. We all know that. We've had a very current example in Manitoba over the weekend about what happens in overcrowded conditions. We're very concerned because with the abrupt closure of CRCs, boards of directors have disbanded and licensing of group homes has been allowed to lapse, so we will no longer be able, in some jurisdictions, to resurrect those houses. They are gone forever, and I think in Ontario we have to be more creative and more innovative and look to alternatives to incarceration.

There is a large population -- 80% of the people under the mandated corrections are non-violent -- so we have to look at ways in which we can deal with these people more effectively. The only way we're going to be able to achieve those goals and assist the government, as community agencies, in streamlining the cost of corrections is to seriously look at that 80% of the budget of corrections that goes into institutions and transferring some of those dollars out into the community so that we can really begin to be innovative and plan for ways to disincarcerate the members of our criminal population who don't need to be there.

The Vice-Chair: We are going to have to stop there. Thank you very much. On behalf of the justice committee, I thank both of you for appearing in front of us today.

Mrs Boyd, just before we move on to the next presenter, you indicated you may have a question for staff clarification. Go ahead.

Mrs Boyd: It's fine at the end of the day when all the presenters have presented. They are our visitors and we should probably accommodate them first.

The Vice-Chair: Sure. Excellent.

1700

JOHN HOWARD SOCIETY OF ONTARIO

The Vice-Chair: Next is the John Howard Society of Ontario. Mr Graham Stewart, welcome. You have 30 minutes for your presentation. Within that, you can leave some time for questions, if you like. You can begin.

Mr Graham Stewart: I'd just like to begin by thanking you for rearranging the schedule to accommodate me this afternoon. I apologize for any inconvenience. At the same time, I appreciate the opportunity to hear the other witnesses. I find this a fascinating field that's always open to new insights.

My name is Graham Stewart. I'm the executive director of the John Howard Society of Ontario. The John Howard Society has 17 branches throughout Ontario, mostly in the larger centres, providing a range of services from school education programs through to after-care services for offenders being released after very long sentences in penitentiaries.

The John Howard Society was founded in 1929 by General Draper, who was then the chief of police of the city of Toronto. He viewed the lack of support and opportunity for those released from prison as factors which undermined the efforts of police and other justice officials to address crime. He was very concerned that those who leave prison not be destitute, frightened or view the community as being hostile to them. His observations are as valid today as they were in 1929. General Draper was not a soft-hearted apologist for crime or criminals. He was rational. Punishment and law enforcement, however, were futile without rehabilitation. He also felt that that rehabilitation was most effective in the community.

The basic maxim of those who work in the field of corrections is that you can't counsel a hungry man. Basic survival needs of food and shelter must be addressed before criminogenic, cognitive and emotional factors can be influenced. A person must have a place to stay that is safe, clean and warm. He must have reasonably nutritious food. The environment must be reasonably pro-social. He must have opportunities to succeed and he must be able to see those opportunities. He must have help when he is tempted to drink or take drugs if he has an addiction problem, and he must be encouraged if he feels depressed or angry. Desperation leads to desperate decisions.

Today the literature on recidivism confirms General Draper's instincts. The literature describes risks and needs. Risks of reoffending are responded to with measures of external control. Needs are responded to with programs that train, treat and educate. The fewer the needs, the better the person is able to exercise personal control and responsibility and therefore the less the need for the external controls. When a person's not motivated to commit a crime, we do not have to spend time and money watching him.

The elimination of community support for services such as halfway houses, employment programs, welfare, along with the expansion of imprisonment and measures of control, such as electronic monitoring, take us back decades in Ontario's social policy. The risk/need balance is gone.

To many people leaving prison today, they face desperate, depressing and hostile circumstances. Under these circumstances, the prospect of serious long-term behaviour change becomes remote.

Each year in Ontario about 40,000 individuals are released from imprisonment. Having short-term accommodation, support and treatment for 400 at any given time was not excessive.

I'm not making this statement as an organization that was operating provincial halfway houses. We do not operate provincial halfway houses and we're not affected directly with their closures.

We also support the recommendations of the Coalition of Community Organizations. Not every offender needs a halfway house, and often these facilities have been used for those who did not require them. The same could be said of hospitals. Too many of those who were sent to halfway houses were such low risk and had such low needs that the house wasn't much more than an irritation. At the same time, far too many that desperately needed the help of such a facility were never given access to them.

Alternatives to halfway houses to assist with gradual release, such as work programs, were used infrequently and when used were never evaluated. There was a great need and opportunity to rationalize gradual release and community integration services, along with supervision and treatment. We are not advocating the status quo.

Closing halfway houses was astonishingly short-sighted. It may also be largely irreversible if allowed to continue too long. Community resistance to opening new houses will make it extremely difficult to find new sites. Years of experience and training of the staff needed to operate these facilities will be lost. The necessary trust between the government and community agencies typically depended on to operate such facilities will also be lost. Halfway houses are no more subsidized housing than the imprisonment that replaces them.

This submission relates primarily to the consideration of electronic monitoring as an alternative to the use of halfway houses and other correctional programming. It is intended to supplement the submission from the Coalition of Community Organizations to which we were signatories and which you have already received, I understand.

We do not support adopting electronic monitoring as part of the correctional strategy for Ontario. I want to elaborate on our reasons and propose alternatives. Attached to our brief is a fact sheet on electronic monitoring which we prepared, intended to put forward basic information that would better inform the public debate.

While electronic monitoring is being presented as an alternative to incarceration, we believe in the longer term that it will be used substantially as an addition to probation, temporary absence and parole. Electronic monitoring seems to appeal to both those who think rehabilitation should be the primary focus of our correctional strategy, as well as those who think correction should emphasize deterrence as the primary focus. Those on the rehabilitation side support the use of electronic monitoring because it appears to be less harsh and therefore less destructive than jail; those on the deterrence side see it as a way to make community supervision more restrictive and punitive.

It is not likely, however, that the same program will be used for both the reduction and the enhancement of punishment and social control. If it satisfies the rehabilitation advocates, it will be applied only to the more serious offenders who would otherwise be clearly prison-bound; if it satisfies the deterrence advocates, it will be applied only to low-risk offenders who might just as easily be released without the additional mechanism.

Electronic monitoring may be less expensive than jail, but it's certainly much more expensive when added to probation, temporary absence or parole. In the end, it seems quite likely that the net impact on the number of individuals incarcerated and the costs of corrections will be negligible, but we will have introduced a new costly level and mechanism of detention which will be difficult to control.

Virtually every advocate of electronic monitoring has a specific type of offender in mind that he thinks is suitable for the program. The Ontario program will focus on those who are low risk and have committed offences that did not involve any violence. Others argue that electronic monitoring is appropriate for the most serious offenders and, in particular, federal parolees, lifers and those released on statutory release. Electronic monitoring may be a feature in the proposed legislation to provide extended supervision for a new category of dangerous federal offenders. It's worth reflecting that in Newfoundland the electronic monitoring program is designed to address those who are seen as moderate risks, Saskatchewan sees it as an addition to probation and as a sentencing option, while in British Columbia it's focusing on those who are seen as low-risk incarcerates.

The problem for the John Howard Society is that if this form of community supervision can be justified with the least serious and it can also be justified for the most serious offenders, then surely there is no reason why it should not be applied to the great majority of offenders who fall into the middle. Once in place, surely it will be a virtually irresistible temptation of politicians to use the expansion of electronic monitoring as a way to respond to public fear and anger generated by the inevitable serious events and to demonstrate that government is doing something to address the need for enhanced public safety. It seems almost inevitable that electronic monitoring will eventually be added to existing community supervision at major additional costs to the existing community supervision programs operated by the Ministry of Correctional Services.

At the same time, research from other jurisdictions which use electronic monitoring shows that it unlikely that we would see a significant drop in prison costs which would be attributable to electronic monitoring. With respect to costs, it should be noted that substantial cost savings would only be achieved when the number of persons on electronic monitoring permits the closure of an institution or a portion of an institution. For example, it would take a reduction of 4,200 offenders on electronic monitoring each year for an average period of one month to close a 350-bed institution in Ontario. Even at this unlikely level of use, the program would reduce prison bed use by only 5% in Ontario. If distributed proportionately across the province, that would not allow for the closing of any institutions.

1710

Electronic monitoring will only save money if it's used with offenders who would otherwise be in jail. If it is used to increase the severity of probation and parole or temporary absences, or if judges use electronic monitoring as a rationale to send people to prison, then in fact it will be more costly. With that in mind, the obvious method by which a judge could do that is simply sentence a person to an intermittent sentence with a recommendation for temporary absence. I think within the construct of the current model as proposed, that's quite a substantial possibility.

In 1987, before the BC pilot project began, correctional officials estimated that five staff would be sufficient to manage 150 offenders on electronic monitors. Three years later, the evaluation of the project deemed that it was necessary to increase that ratio by eight times.

The fact that Ontario's costs are estimated at $17 a day -- I heard others say $5 a day -- as opposed to British Columbia spending $45 and Newfoundland $50 I think reflects the fact that fairly typically when electronic monitoring is introduced into different jurisdictions, the costs of the program are underestimated.

The 1989 pilot study of electronic monitoring in Ontario found that when criteria excluded the violent and the impaired driver offenders from the project, the cost of the project could not be justified in terms of the small numbers of people who were released on electronic monitoring. Most importantly, the ministry acknowledged that many of those who were released could have been safely released on temporary absence or other forms of gradual release.

In British Columbia the program started with similar criteria, and by 1993, 30% of those on electronic monitoring were being classified as having committed offences against the persons, or serious, or sexual or violent.

The simple fact is that most appraisals of electronic monitoring are completed by those who are operating the program, and their own determination of success becomes the rationale for expanding the service.

In the state of Michigan, electronic monitoring was introduced to save halfway houses and the temporary absence program. Although individuals on furlough had a very high success rate, public pressure to toughen the system threatened discontinuation of the program. Today, virtually every inmate given early release in Michigan must undergo a period under electronic monitoring. This "successful" program appears to have expanded the supervision of those who would have been released in any event. If electronic monitoring saved the furlough program, there may have been a cost avoidance but there was certainly not a cost saving.

The plan to charge offenders for the cost of electronic monitoring programs may be superficially attractive, but even with the sliding-scale model proposed by Ontario, there are serious problems. The figure of $8 a day for electronic monitoring has been justified on the basis that halfway houses were charging the same. This argument overlooks the fact that halfway houses were providing accommodation and food that the person would otherwise have to be responsible for anyway. In fact, the relatively cheap accommodation gave the person the opportunity to save from employment earnings in order to be able to pay the rent required to set up in his own room after release. The electronic monitoring fee only adds to the financial burden of released inmates. American programs were found to shy away from indigent, subsidized ex-offenders in order to demonstrate that the programs were cost-effective. These programs almost inevitably boast of their cost recovery success.

A system of incarceration which can inexpensively turn any home into a jail must be viewed with great concern. By its very nature, electronic monitoring is seductive and expansionary. Once in place, it would be extremely difficult to terminate such a program. A program that is promoted as a measure to increase public safety and has associated with it notions of gadgetry and science fiction computerized control systems will always appeal to those who feel that any measure of supervision, control, inconvenience or just plain harassment can be justified.

There are ways which are much more effective than electronic monitoring to reduce the use of imprisonment in Ontario. We have documented and forwarded to the Solicitor General and Minister of Correctional Services and his officials our proposals for ways in which temporary absence and parole could be reformed to bring about substantial reductions in the use of imprisonment without the need for new legislation. In the same document we have also presented estimates of substantial cost savings which could be achieved through these proposals.

In summary, we are not opposed to electronic monitoring because we are opposed to or fear technology. Nor are we opposed to electronic monitoring because we cannot conceive of any circumstances in which a given individual might benefit from being placed under those circumstances. And we are aware that, given the choice, many inmates would choose electronic monitoring over imprisonment.

Our concern is that we view electronic monitoring as the genie in the bottle that while in the bottle promises to be good, promises to do exactly what we want it to do and not to get out of control, but that once out of the bottle can't be put back in and can't be controlled.

We are concerned that electronic monitoring detracts from the programs and services that actually make a difference in terms of reduction of crime. We are concerned that it takes resources from those other programs, and in the case of halfway houses has replaced those programs that had much greater potential.

We are also concerned that in eliminating halfway houses we have removed a very important resource from those who already are lacking some of the key elements of success; that is, work, home, a telephone and a family.

The research on recidivism is clear. Appropriate programs directed at persons with specific needs can reduce recidivism substantially. Others have provided information to this committee on the effectiveness of programs and the related risk/need assessment tools, such as the Coalition of Community Organizations. We hope that in developing social policy for corrections in Ontario, you will understand that harsh and expensive punitive measures are ineffective. Alone, they do not reform offenders and they do not restore confidence in the criminal justice system. The failure of harsh measures only encourages demands for more and even harsher measures.

Public safety and public confidence, in our view, can only be achieved by measures that steadfastly pursue objectively measured effectiveness. Punishment is an expensive, though admittedly popular, indulgence. In times of financial restraint it's wasteful, and at all times it only promotes future victimization.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you, Mr Stewart. We have approximately 10 minutes per caucus. Ms Boyd.

Mrs Boyd: Thank you very much for coming. You've done a lot of work and in your fact sheet brought together some of the information that before was kind of scattered for us. So I really am appreciative that you've done this, and we'll be certainly checking back in terms of the way in which this information compares to what we were hearing from the various groups that are in favour of this as a proposal.

For example, you talk about the issue of the effect that electronic monitoring has had on the -- dare I say? -- class breakdown in prisons in jurisdictions in the United States, and yet Mr Nimer yesterday from Florida said, oh no, when somebody can't afford the cost, they subsidize it. I think he said $720,000 or something -- I think that's what I heard -- as a subsidy to ensure that this in fact did not mean that those who do not have resources stay in prison and those who do have resources can afford to be out. I gather this is one of the major concerns that you would have, that this $240 a month that $8 a day would imply in our system might automatically mean a whole lot of people were not eligible. I think that may have been what the previous folks were trying to get at as well, although they didn't have the figures to do it with.

1720

Mr Stewart: Certainly, it adds to the problems of the person being released. Finances are always a major issue for those being released from jail. If one doesn't steal, then one has to find a job and manage. Without resources behind them, it's difficult under the best of circumstances.

How the program operates can vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but in the United States when there are commercial firms, profit-making firms, operating electronic monitoring, cost-effectiveness is a very important aspect of their operation, and that's achieved by cost recovery in many instances. It's difficult for me to believe that under those circumstances there would not be reluctance in some cases to have large caseloads of individuals who are indigent. There's some evidence from some of the global literature in the United States that indeed people without resources are not fairly represented in these programs.

Mrs Boyd: In fact, there's some evidence that's been recently available in Ontario to that effect. The commission on systemic racism clearly showed that one of the problems is the lack of likelihood that someone is going to have paid employment having a real effect on whether or not they get sentenced to jail in the first place.

We certainly have lots of evidence that has been prepared to say that already those who are likely to face incarceration are those who are least likely to have resources. If you add on top of that a layer of you're there, you're incarcerated, your chances of getting out and getting the opportunity to become self-sufficient again are further limited by the resources that you may or may not have. That has a fairly serious effect, it would seem to me, on what would actually result in terms of our ability to assume any kind of success in rehabilitation.

Mr Stewart: I think the whole existence of intermittent sentences reflects that very fact. That's why intermittent sentences were started, to accommodate those who had employment and were otherwise stable but had to face a mandatory jail term.

The other side is the point which I made earlier, that when a person was staying in a halfway house, they were in a position where they could actually save for the time when they would leave the house. To find a room requires money up front. To have the essential dishes, if you're going to be doing your own cooking, basic clothes, employment, requires that a person have some resources behind them. The electronic monitoring assumes not only that the person has all those resources in place, but also has the ability to contribute further. That can only be a barrier to those who are not already employed and have family support and a telephone and all the resources.

This is a group that we generally don't worry very much about in criminal justice. This is a group that have a very low likelihood of recidivating in the first place. So it's unlikely that electronic monitoring can improve that.

Mrs Boyd: Is it your position that the CRCs did serve that group of people?

Mr Stewart: They certainly served some of that group. I think it could have been much better in many circumstances. I was concerned that often people went into CRCs who didn't need that resource, and a large number of others who could have used that resource didn't have it available to them. It's my own view that CRCs are best used for the moderate- to higher-risk individuals rather than the very-low-risk individuals.

In Ontario, where sentences are relatively short -- 80% are serving less than six months -- using simple detention as a strategy of public protection is at best six months. We really have to look at the period of the sentence as being an opportunity to try to influence the behaviour of that individual in order to have any longer-term benefit.

Those who are in need of a residence, and I see that as individuals who, first of all, may have no place to go, or second, those who need the structure of the facility, or thirdly, those who need the additional programs and services which could be organized or advocated for within those houses, were the logical group that would benefit most, and in the end they would have the greatest impact. Indeed, that's quite consistent with the research. The research shows that if you provide too much supervision and programming for very-low-risk offenders, you will increase the likelihood of them reoffending -- they will actually do worse -- whereas if you put intensive programming in for those who are considered to be the moderate- to higher-risk individuals, you will significantly reduce recidivism.

Mr Howard Hampton (Rainy River): Just a couple of definitions. In the Ontario system, do you have a sense of what a high-risk individual is? We're not dealing with criminal types, in my view, we're not dealing with criminal behaviour, in a lot of the Ontario correctional system.

Mr Stewart: By definition, of course, it's those serving less than two years, so they can have quite a range of behaviours. Some of them indeed were very violent and very serious offences in some cases, relatively few in proportion. It's certainly behaviour that we wouldn't want to minimize, but the fact that they're in that system for a relatively short period of time, in my view, is the very reason why using detention is the strategy of public protection. Protection is so futile that the obligation we have is to try to reduce reoffending, I believe. What that implies for me is to place your resources with those you worry the most about.

It's my view that most of the preoccupation with the system is to avoid risk rather than to reduce risk, that the whole nature of parole, the whole nature of temporary absence and now electronic monitoring is to define very carefully the group that's likely to succeed regardless and put them in the program so that you'll have a high success rate, which of course you would have had regardless. But the fact is that when we look at behaviour change, it's those who are the higher risk where you can actually get the better results. You will also have more failures, of course, and some of them will be ones that will attract considerable public attention. But in the long run, we're actually making the community safer.

Mrs Boyd: I guess my last question to you is, you make a very strong case that you see this as an add-on to the system; you see that the experience of other jurisdictions is that the only thing that will make this look as though it's not an add-on to the system is the removal of the CRCs, which in fact most of the other jurisdictions have retained. So it really is a shell game in terms of moving those resources around.

Mr Stewart: Although the two notions have been raised together, it's very difficult for me to see that those who would be subjected to electronic monitoring are anything similar to the group that needed halfway houses. At the same time, I think that electronic monitoring, by its very nature and the very fact that it can be justified with so many rationales with so many different ideologies behind them and in fact is being operated in such diverse ways across North America suggests that, with time, we will have a system that will simply be added on to existing programs and services, at substantial cost. It's my view, particularly with virtually the total absence of any evidence that there have been any cost savings or prisons closed where electronic monitoring is in place, that we've added a significant cost to corrections that has no rehabilitative potential. That, in my view, is really tragic.

Mr Hampton: One more?

The Chair: Yes.

Mr Hampton: Part of the problem the Ministry of the Solicitor General and Correctional Services has is that it's got a number of smaller jails, old jails, in smaller cities and towns in Ontario, and it's been struggling to find a way to close those institutions for some time. Can you see how this strategy, using electronic monitoring, might facilitate that? Can you see how this strategy would have to be adapted or changed, the strategy of electronic monitoring, to permit that to happen?

Mr Stewart: I don't think that's possible at all. I don't think it could because of some of the reasoning I referred to earlier. In order to reduce the prison population by 350 in the province of Ontario, 4,200 people would have to be released for one month. That's, as I pointed out, 5%. No institution is going to close because they've been able to decrease their population by 5%. In some institutions, that wouldn't even account for the double bunking in their institutions.

Mr Hampton: Just to be clear, these are very small jails. They may have a total population of, say, 20 or 30 people. Generally, it's my understanding that their actual inmate population is very low.

Mr Stewart: Well, unless you can pool people in areas and concentrate prison populations quite substantially, I don't think you would ever see the numbers through electronic monitoring in Ontario that could, alone, justify the closing of an institution. There are other ways to substantially reduce the prison population overall. I'm not even sure that concentrating on small jails is necessarily the best strategy.

1730

It's tempting because they're obviously inefficient, and they seem costly, but so are hospitals in small communities. Small communities' institutions tend to be more expensive than large ones, but when we talk about a substantial strategy that could reduce incarceration levels that could lead to the closing of major institutions, for instance, such as Guelph, we could see substantial cost savings within the ministry as a whole. That I think could be achieved through substantial revisions to the way in which gradual release is currently organization, particularly the integration of temporary absence and parole.

The changing and much more sophisticated substantial method of classifying people with respect to presumption of release could have a dramatic effect that would far outstrip any cost saving that might be achieved through electronic monitoring and wouldn't even require, in my view, legislative change.

Mr Garry J. Guzzo (Ottawa-Rideau): I apologize that I didn't hear your entire presentation. Don't hesitate to advise me if I'm in error and please don't misinterpret anything I say. I'm very familiar with the operation of the John Howard Society in eastern Ontario and indeed in other places, including Niagara and Welland.

I heard you suggest that you wanted to see a reduction in the criteria for the temporary absence program. Did I misinterpret that?

Mr Stewart: It might be interpreted that way, but that's not what I said. I said that I thought parole and temporary absence could be integrated into a simple authority and a system in place that categorized people according to some major criteria which for the lowest ones could change the presumption of release. That in turn would result in more people being released on temporary absence.

Mr Guzzo: I see. It would bring on the advent of parole earlier, but not necessarily make the requirements for the temporary absence program less stringent.

Mr Stewart: Two parts of parole and temporary absence are complicated. One is the decision-making process, how a person is actually released, and the second is the supervision process.

One problem with parole in the province of Ontario is that the process takes so long that people serving less than six months generally aren't even considered for it, which means that the group that is probably your lowest risk never gets parole, which in itself is wasteful.

At the same time, the temporary absence program is potentially a more efficient releasing mechanism, but it's used very cautiously because it's entirely dependent on the superintendent of the local institution who is often working outside of any kind of a policy context that helps him; and because of the personal risk of decision-making, it tends to be used very conservatively, which is one of the reasons why halfway houses had so many people going to them who were very low risk and were not being used for those we would be more concerned about.

Mr Guzzo: All right. My other question was with regard to front-end option in terms of sentencing. You suggested that under the EM program there now exists a front-end option. Maybe the words are mine, not yours, and I apologize if that's so. I interpret that to mean there was an option by the judge, by the court, to use the EM program.

Mr Stewart: One concern with electronic monitoring has always been that it would just be used to enhance probation rather than really reduce the use of incarceration. One response to that is to make it purely within the control of correctional authorities to determine whether a person has that option and not giving it as an option to judges. With intermittent sentencing being available to judges along with their recommendations, it seems to me quite possible and quite likely that judges would use intermittent sentencing as a way to sentence a person to electronic monitoring.

Mr Guzzo: I follow you. Thank you very much, sir.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Stewart, for your very thoughtful presentation and your patience in waiting for the time of your presentation.

Mr Stewart: Thank you. I appreciate it.

The Chair: Mrs Boyd, you had a point of clarification.

Mrs Boyd: Yes. I wonder if Mike could come up and answer just a couple of questions. I'll explain the context.

When we were having our meeting over in MNR around the BC program and hearing a very detailed description of the nature of supervision in the BC program, I certainly didn't get a sense from the presentation we had from you folks about the exact nature of the supervision you were planning and whether it paralleled very closely the kind of thing we were seeing in BC, with the hand-held breathalyser and the visits and the responsibility on the electronic monitoring officer to make referrals into the community. Can you clarify that for me?

Mr Michael O'Neal: Certainly I can. The earlier presentation, as you'll recall, focused to a significant extent on introducing the committee to the technology. Perhaps I didn't emphasize enough some program aspects of Ontario's introduction to electronic monitoring.

As you've pointed out, we didn't break new ground here in Ontario. I heard from an earlier presenter that we introduced electronic monitoring quickly, and indeed we did, but I want to make it clear that we introduced it carefully and that we did so after consulting other jurisdictions. One we consulted at great length was British Columbia. We consulted with them around the selection of the technology, but we also consulted them on the development of the program that would help to successfully support the introduction of the technology, and our program in many ways mirrors what is in British Columbia.

I think you heard from the presenter from British Columbia that doing home visits is an integral part of the program and something they attribute the fairly high success rate to.

We in Ontario have built that into our program as well. We have three levels of supervision for electronic monitoring, the first of which involves home visits once every two weeks at a minimum, telephone calls to the inmate twice per week at a minimum, telephone calls to relevant collateral contacts at least once per week, a review of the inmate's monthly phone bill and drive-by checks once every three weeks at a minimum.

That's our minimum level and doesn't mean that officers won't be consulting significant others more frequently than that or making visits on a more frequent basis. Of course, it depends on how the individual is performing on the program at any point in time.

The other level of supervision is a medium level. Anyone who gets out on electronic monitoring initially is treated as a maximum case, but the medium level requires home visits at least once per month, telephone calls to the inmate at least once per week, telephone calls to relevant collateral contacts at least once every two weeks, a review of the phone bill and drive-by checks at least once per month.

The third level is a cascade off electronic monitoring to straight extended TAP. We don't see this as at all inconsistent with the program. We believe that when offenders have proven they no longer require the degree of monitoring associated with the use of the technology, they should no longer have the technology to contend with and should be cascaded to a straight extended temporary absence pass, so we've allowed for that and built it into our program model.

Mrs Boyd: Can you explain to me why it costs $45 in BC as opposed to your estimated $17 here? There seems to be a tremendous credibility gap.

1740

Mr O'Neal: I think there's a case of misunderstanding in many respects. Some figures I've heard quoted related to an article in a newspaper or other media. We've always said officially that our budget for electronic monitoring is $3.2 million, that we are shooting for a target of 400 offenders, and if we achieve 400 offenders and spend the full $3.2 million and we have a running balance of 400 clients, we will be looking at $22 per day for those clients.

How does that compare to British Columbia at $45 a day? In British Columbia, the electronic monitoring officers do everything from start to finish. As I said to some extent in my earlier presentation, in Ontario we have utilized some of our existing resources to do some aspects of the electronic monitoring program process.

For example, we would utilize existing temporary absence pass staff to process the TAP application. We would use classification staff to administer the level of service inventory-(Ontario revision) to get some of that work done. We use the electronic monitoring officer to manage the case beyond that and to supervise the client once he or she has been selected and released into the community on the conditions of electronic monitoring and TAP.

Some of those costs were not added in because we're asking people to do the jobs they're doing anyway, but in this case with respect to clients who are going out on to electronic monitoring as opposed to other forms of temporary absence pass.

Mr David Tilson (Dufferin): One criticism we've heard from a couple of groups that came forward is that contrary to what is done in halfway houses, there is no counselling for people who have drug or alcohol problems, anger management, those types of things. Is anyone going to be dealing with that or going to be trained on that topic, whether it be an electronic monitoring official or other people you've talked about? I'm looking for a response to that specific criticism.

Mr O'Neal: One comment was made earlier, a sort of criticism, that we weren't using probation and parole officers, that we were using employees of the institution to act as electronic monitoring officers, suggesting that perhaps people didn't have the skills to make referrals into the community. I take issue with that, particularly since British Columbia took exactly the same approach we've taken. They're not using probation and parole officers to function as electronic monitoring officers generally. They're using people who in most cases were working in the institutions and they've selected those individuals to act as electronic monitoring officers. Their program is successful. Their employees also make referrals to community agencies. Our employees I believe will be successful, and the program will prove that over time. I think they'll also be able to make successful referrals into the community.

While probation and parole officers have a skill set that's quite essential and that skill set is designed to deal with offenders usually on a longer term in the community, we have some very skilled individuals in our institutions as well. We have professionals who have been trained in classification, and some of those individuals are right now on temporary assignments as electronic monitoring officers. Many of those skilled individuals working for us are electronic monitoring officers right now.

The other thing we did, and I mentioned this earlier, is that in the 10 days of intensive training we provided to the first wave of electronic monitoring officers, we made sure to address many soft skill areas so that those individuals would feel confident in interacting effectively with clients and able to make appropriate referrals into the community where those referrals were necessary.

I believe that a combination of skills that were already there in seasoned correctional staff, along with the training provided as part of the introduction of the program, means that we have a program with competent staff that's able to make referrals to the community.

The Chair: Excuse me, Mr Tilson. I don't want to cut anybody off, but we are eating into our preparation time for the report, which is going to become critical because we've heard a lot of information. Unless it's very important, restrict it to a very short question.

Mr Tilson: It is very short. Do you believe that the counselling provided in the halfway houses will be matched by whatever is going to be provided through the electronic monitoring system?

Mr O'Neal: That's really difficult for me to comment on. First of all, community resource centres are not really my area of expertise. My colleague Frances McKeague would be in a better position to comment on the programs in community resource centres. I can comment on the programming that will be available through electronic monitoring. As I've said previously, we will be looking to utilize existing resources in the community and make referrals there. Where necessary, I think it's worth noting as well, we did retain community resource agreements to be utilized with people who require residence, not for electronic monitoring.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr O'Neal. Mrs Boyd: If someone cannot afford the $240 cost, does that mean they are not eligible for the program?

Mr O'Neal: No. Being able to afford $8 a day was not a requirement. Let me put it differently. If a person cannot afford the $8 a day, we're not denying access to the program.

The Chair: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We are now adjourned.

The committee adjourned at 1746.