ONTARIO HALFWAY HOUSE ASSOCIATION
AMERICAN PROBATION AND PAROLE ASSOCIATION
CONTENTS
Monday 6 May 1996
Electronic monitoring
St Leonard's House
Elizabeth White, executive director, St Leonard's Society of Canada
Peter Aharan, executive director, St Leonard's Society of London
William Sanderson, executive director, St Leonard's Society of Brant
Ontario Halfway House Association
John Clinton, vice-president
Ontario Provincial Police
Chris Wyatt, superintendent
American Probation and Parole Association
Donald Evans, chair
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
Substitutions present / Membres remplaçants présents:
Carr, Gary (Oakville South / -Sud PC) for Mr Guzzo
Castrilli, Annamarie (Downsview L) for Mr Chiarelli
Clerk / Greffière: Donna Bryce
Staff / Personnel: Susan Swift, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1535 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.
The Chair (Mr Gerry Martiniuk): I'll call the meeting to order of the justice committee. I see a quorum.
ST LEONARD'S HOUSE
The Chair: Our next witnesses are on time, and I thank you for that: St Leonard's House and Ms Elizabeth White, the executive director, welcome.
Ms Elizabeth White: On behalf of the St Leonard's Society, I want to thank the committee for the opportunity to meet with you on the matter of halfway houses and electronic monitoring. We have prepared a summary brief, which is at your places and may serve as a reference point for you after we've completed our presentation.
My name is Elizabeth White, and I'm the executive director of St Leonard's Canada. With me today are Mr Peter Aharan to my left, who is the executive director of St Leonard's London and who will speak with you about specialized residential services for the provincial client. Mr William Sanderson, executive director St Leonard's Brant, is to my right, and he will discuss the implications of community-based electronic monitoring programs.
Allow me first to briefly describe for you the St Leonard's Society of Canada in order to set a context for our participation in this presentation. St Leonard's is an affiliate-based organization which exists to support community agencies in their efforts to provide programs and services which make Canada safer by efficiently and effectively assisting people to live free of crime.
St Leonard's began in Windsor where it pioneered the concept of halfway living for men who'd been incarcerated in the federal system. Community volunteers determined the need for the service based on the difficulties men had in returning to their home communities after a period of incarceration.
An examination of their needs indicated that community-based supports could have a positive impact on the returnees' ability to integrate with society. In 1962 a house was opened that provided a structured and responsive program opportunity to assist the interested offender to make a successful transition to living independently in the community.
The success of the program has been reaffirmed many times over as other communities across Canada adopted the model of giving people a chance to establish themselves and live productively back within society.
St Leonard's has also sponsored the creation of a variety of other community responses to criminality. As the numbers of persons sentenced to long periods of time grew and men who had been separated from society for decades were returning to an unrecognizably altered society, St Leonard's developed a program specifically to address their needs. This program, called Lifeline, is now being reviewed for implementation across Canada.
With such services, the St Leonard's affiliates and many other community-based organizations provide the community component to the effective integration of former offenders. Because the people who use our programs and services come to us by choice, they are inclined to take advantage of the proven and successful services which we offer throughout Ontario and across Canada.
We are one of the organizations of community-based service responses to the need for communities to be involved in the criminal justice system. Others have appeared before you already on this particular issue, and there are some who are going to appear next week.
We have all supported the development of the brief of the coalition, which is also at your places today and which has been previously presented to you. My colleagues and I do not intend to revisit the detail in that today. Rather, we will develop some of the specialized issues of concern to us that have arisen during the course of this past year in this matter.
First, a word about community-based involvement and a slight distinction from community programs. The clerk's office very kindly provided me with a copy of the recent Hansards of your hearings, and I note in a few places references to a notion that the closure of community resource centres does not diminish the commitment to or the existence of community programs. Indeed, over 85% of the Ministry of Solicitor General and Correctional Services clients are not incarcerated. That doesn't mean that they are in community-based programs. Primarily they are in programs that are run by ministry and with ministry staff.
Our work is in the community-based program and services, and it is a different issue. Our agencies reflect the concerns of the citizens in their home communities. They develop within the community. They are a community response. It is the community's desire to use them to create a safer society. It's not a minor variance.
Community-based boards of directors reflect the community concern to manage its social responses, to take responsibility for the success of individuals who are trying to improve their way of living in our society.
In Ontario we need to encourage this kind of community taking on of responsibility. Many of the Ontario ministry staff are committed to positive results for persons under their mandate within the community. In fact, I would say virtually all of them are; "many" is an incorrect word. They work creatively and with great effort to support that integration. To the extent that they succeed in supporting a continuum of service provision for clients back into the community, they are part of the government's commitment to the reduction of reoffending. In other words, to shorten it: Successful community placements reduce recidivism.
The involvement of the community is necessary in order that the system may better reflect the concerns of our communities and respond to communities' needs for services to promote crime-free living. We are convinced that without the active participation of the community in criminal justice, the goal of a safe society is made more difficult and more fiscally expensive to attain. We all know that prisons are very expensive; we also know that they do not reduce recidivism. The contrary, in fact, appears to be the well-documented, researched case.
I can't stress the point often enough that community-based organizations exist to promote community safety. However, we certainly do not purport to have an exclusive on the mechanisms that can have that result. What we do have is the ability to creatively respond to changing needs for safety at the local level. We have that ability because of our volunteer base, our volunteer governance and the fact that our volunteers are in our communities. That is our foundation and our continuance is premised upon that volunteer activity and commitment.
It is our goal, as it is the goal of our colleagues in police and corrections, that we should all live in as safe an environment as possible. Through St Leonard's programs some of the components which enable our society to be a safer place are offered. We get more safety in Ontario for less money in both the short and the long term when we allocate our tax dollars to structured, community-based releases than we do when we use incarceration for persons for whom imprisonment will not and cannot contribute to their development of a crime-free lifestyle.
The fact is, the greater the static security interventions you use, the more it costs in daily dollars. So we know that to imprison costs around $132 a day and that the cost of community interventions is approximately one fifth of that. Some say we need to incur the cost of imprisonment to give our society protection, and we do not argue. There are some individuals who need to be physically separated from society for at least a period of time, but we're talking here of those whose maximum length of sentence is two years less one day. All of those under the Ontario mandate are returning very quickly to our streets, as you well know.
So how do we buy the most safety for the dollars which we expend? It isn't, in my submission, by focusing on the low-end-needs individual. It is by identifying and responding to the higher levels of need indicated by individuals and the barriers they face as they try to live in our society.
As the co-chair of the 1995 joint government community report on women in conflict with the law in Ontario, Women's Voices, Women's Choices, I had the privilege of examining in some detail the relative effectiveness of these very short periods of incarceration which are the provincial norm and the very significant needs indicated by the women in the system for assistance to improve their method of coping with the challenges of living in Ontario in the 1990s. Our findings were quite unequivocal and I recommend to you a review of the many excellent recommendations in that report. I consider they are, in large part, applicable to the much larger male population in conflict with the law in this province.
One key concept which I would bring to you is the need to maintain overall provincial standards, an umbrella if you will of guidelines as to service provision to meet need, but to thereafter have the government take a strong leadership role by supporting the implementation of local solutions as appropriate. That way you respond to community need.
The fact is that in some communities that will mean a halfway house; in another it may mean use of occasional bed space, and in every community it will mean access to trained, effective counselling. In a very few cases provincially, it will mean the use of our expensive prison accommodations.
The question is: What safety do you buy with imprisonment when you take people out of the community programs and put them inside? The research shows that at least 75% of those in Ontario jails are not convicted of crimes of violence. Yet the most recent information I have shows the Ministry of the Solicitor General and Correctional Services spending approximately 80% of a $361-million budget keeping people locked up for a few months. We believe that the greater part of that money would be better spent enabling those individuals to become law-abiding contributors to society.
Financial resources are and will remain scarce. It is most prudent that the ministry allocate moneys to proven risk-reduction strategies for individuals of higher needs and risks. It is not useful to pay the tremendous expense of keeping people in jails when the short- and long-term expenses will be less if they are in a supervised community setting.
We know effective programs reduce recidivism. Ontario gets decreased costs and greater safety when it uses good community correctional treatment options. That research has been taking place for 20 years, and although some of the percentages may vary from place to place the overall results are certainly not in dispute. A few points on that:
The first is that without structure and encouragement, individuals in conflict with the law might not choose to seek out treatment. In earlier presentations the case has been made to you that individuals who were in halfway houses prior to October, 1995 could access treatment at other community centres rather than in the halfway house, and that indeed some did so. That is true.
However, experience tells us it is not enough to simply refer someone to the blue book. Treatment as a component of release is more effective than simply providing a list of supposedly accessible community resources when going out of the prison door. I say "supposedly accessible" because it is our experience that many purportedly available resources are simply not available to persons with a criminal record, particularly for persons with a record for a crime that is designated as one of violence.
Individuals may need the encouragement or support of a counsellor to get to the sessions, to simply cope with that one step. They may need representations from that counsellor to get access to a program that says: "A conviction for assault? You're violent. Not in our place, thank you very much."
The development of electronic monitoring in North America has been very swift, and it sometimes appears to me that the technology is advancing far more quickly than our understanding of the implications of its use. The comments by earlier presenters of their experience in developing electronic monitoring programs that effectively respond to community needs clearly indicate that hardware alone is not the solution.
I noted with interest the comments of your assistant deputy minister, corrections branch, that a result of the Mimico experiment was that the technology worked. I agree that it did. However, I would go much further in discussing its impact.
At that time I was the executive director of Elizabeth Fry Ontario, and in that capacity spoke often of my network's position concerning net-widening concerns for electronic monitoring and the dehumanization that we feared would be the result of the use of the program. In fact, in the particular instance of the pilot program, we found the involvement of the officers who ran the program to be such that it was elevated far beyond an electronic check-in. Those officers met with, counselled and supported their clients, all of whom had been subject to a rigorous selection process, on such a frequent basis that the level of support enjoyed by the men in the program was equal to the very highest levels of service. It was the attitude and role played by those officers, not just the technology, that worked in that pilot project.
Although I never did see the final report on the pilot project, it is my belief that there was a high ratio of staff time involved for the very few number of persons who were qualified to be on the program. It certainly never attained the kinds of numbers that we are now told are required to achieve the low per diem that would become very cost-effective for this province. Yet the higher the numbers on the program without adequate increases in funding for counselling staff, the less likely it is that you will get those good interactions that worked so well in the Mimico project.
Our strong suggestion to you is that halfway houses are needed for those in the provincial system with a higher level of need. Structuring electronic monitoring to be for those of low need will not significantly increase community safety and will not replace the effective, efficient houses which supported community-based corrections in Ontario prior to October 1995. In a reorganized corrections setting, some of those houses may not be needed, but in my submission, without implementing the diversions and alternatives that could be possible on a large scale, we have as of last October lost access to an excellent, efficient resource in the continuum of care and we're not seeing a replacement for it yet.
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Our scarce resources need to be addressed to those whose level of need indicates a likelihood of reoffending unless supported and motivated to change. Mr Aharan and Mr Sanderson both have comments for you which indicate specific ways in which this can be achieved.
Ontario's experience has been that the appropriate use of alternatives to incarceration is cost-effective and promotes community safety, but there is no system that guarantees community safety and we fool ourselves if we look for one that can do so. Tragedies happen. We can learn from them. We can improve our systems as circumstances change and as our investments in research lead us to develop improved interventions. But we will never be able to eradicate all crime. What we can and must do is to take all steps within our knowledge and experience to reduce the likelihood of criminal activity. A range of actions are available to us to do so. One of the most successful, cost-effective and human-development-effective methods we have is a conditional release system with a variety of options to address criminogenic factors and increase the chance that an individual will live crime-free in the future.
Residential services, where appropriate, are part of that response, as is appropriately run electronic monitoring. We must not be confused by some quick savings of dollars at the expense of retaining our ability to respond to crime in the ways which research has proven to be effective. We should not replace interventions directed at the higher-need individual with interventions that are designed only for low-need persons. I wish you well in your deliberations on these important and most complex issues, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you.
Mr Peter Aharan: I too add my thanks for the opportunity to appear before the justice committee. I'll condense my remarks in an effort not to duplicate those previously, and I believe subsequently, expressed. However, I would like to really emphasize the suggestion that what we are speaking to here is how to best allocate scarce resources and how to address a continuum of care. We clearly understand that not everybody will succeed in a community-based program of some description -- probation or perhaps even a diversion program if we should see the expansion of that at one end of the continuum. I think we all equally recognize that incarceration for all persons is unnecessary, and certainly in any economic climate is unfeasible.
St Leonard's, through Elizabeth's presentation, has made a point of stressing our experience in providing community-based correctional programs, and certainly we sit here very proud of that fact. I would like to offer a few suggestions on how I believe, based on our experience at the operational level, perhaps greater efficiency and increased community safety, along with shared accountability among knowledgeable and experienced stakeholders, is a common goal of all Ontarians and improves that community safety.
Two particular issues to highlight, if I may: One concerns electronic monitoring and its ability to achieve a releasing mechanism for the multitude of individuals who present themselves before the correctional system. I believe the criteria currently established, and in fact I think any criteria established, by the ministry will be too restrictive to achieve the release rate that will be necessary to achieve economic targets. Those economic targets, I believe, are possible and those release rates are achievable, getting back to the issue of resource allocation.
Halfway houses provide a community-based location from which appropriate supervision and programs would be delivered to residential clients and expanded I believe quite feasibly to non-residential clients, thus expanding the potential eligibility and maximizing this scarce resource. There is clearly in this suggestion the notion of a shared accountability too, with the ministry, with the community and directly to the community through the board of directors of the community-based organization.
Secondly, I feel that electronic monitoring will not provide appropriate programs for special-needs populations. There are many special-needs populations, and by not mentioning all, I do not wish to downplay the significance of those groups. I would, however, like to highlight two in particular: those individuals who find themselves before the justice system who are developmentally challenged persons and those persons who are ex-psychiatric patients. I will expand on that further.
Thirdly, I believe there's a very significant number of clients who do not require the costly services of a prison setting but do not have the appropriate social or community supports to be released on some form of electronic monitoring. What I mean by that is those offenders who are living in the community, their living arrangements have broken down and they become unsuitable for electronic monitoring.
To illustrate this, I would like to speak to the experience of one setting run by the St Leonard's Society. This particular setting was able to intrude into the correctional system in a way that went well beyond social housing and achieved an actual cost reduction over prison beds. Over a four-year period, the mean length of stay in this facility was approaching 60 days. The occupancy rate was 95%. It did not lay fallow during this period. The sentence length from which the clients came to the setting was an average of 175 days. That's approaching a six-month sentence. The offence description of the residents in 26% of the cases involved violence, and an offence history included violent offences in 29%.
Persons were discharged from the program unsuccessfully, or determined to be unsuccessful, in slightly over 12% of admissions, or more positively expressed, over 87% of those persons admitted with this offence profile were able to complete that portion of their sentence successfully. The number of persons charged with a new criminal offence while in residence was 1%.
The annual recovery in room and board -- that is to say the contribution to their own care -- exceeded $30,000 in each of the four years, and that is a four-year period ending in fiscal year 1995. The ministry per diem, as noted in other submissions, was in the range of the average at $82 a day.
Current information suggests that electronic monitoring alone will not adequately service this offence profile.
I would like to point to another specialized area and illustrate where I think the judicious and strategic use of halfway houses may provide the ministry with that appropriate range of services along the continuum. This concerns a facility which cared for ex-psychiatric and developmentally challenged offenders. I think we all agree that if there is extensive consideration going on throughout the community -- and certainly in my region of London we have a psychiatric hospital closing. I believe that process is under way, and some 300 beds will be reduced in the institutional wing of psychiatric care. Those people will be in our community and, like any persons in our community, that increases the likelihood the persons will come in conflict with the law.
I think the same can be said for the deinstitutionalizing efforts in the Ministry of Community and Social Services concerning the developmentally challenged in institutions which have historically housed those persons. They are being released back into the community, and there's much research to suggest that is the appropriate strategy to take. However, those individuals will, in certain percentages, confront the criminal justice system, as they are now in the community in greater numbers and in greater frequency.
I do not believe the criminal justice system, and particularly a prison environment, has the best resources at its disposal to manage those offenders. Access to doctors, therapists or other necessary interventions are likely severed. As we continue to close long-term-care facilities and discharge increasing numbers of, as the justice system has referred to them, mentally disordered persons to the community, it must be concluded that this number will increase.
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St Leonard's experience indicates that these offenders come into conflict with the law as part of an overall deterioration in their community support. Aging parents, exhausted caregivers and overtaxed community resources often precede that individual's conflict with the law. Once identified as having anti-social behaviour characteristics or conduct disorder, these persons find increasing difficulty in accessing or maintaining their access to community-based supports.
Halfway houses, certainly in the instance I'm reporting on and, I believe, in a broadened capacity, have the opportunity to access specialized community services, re-establish and monitor vital community support and reduce the potentially debilitating aspects of incarceration. The restoration of support systems, in concert with supervision, promotes public safety. It's highly doubtful that the application of an electronic monitoring anklet alone will assist these particular offenders. Unsupported releases to the community will result in an increased demand on various systems, most notably, I suggest, the health care system and the justice system. They are high-ticket, high-cost enterprises.
The special needs of the ex-psychiatric offender or the developmentally challenged offender, coupled with the needs of the public, are best addressed through a correctional system that matches the offender with the appropriate institutional and community-based service. I think that really is the cornerstone of a theme that many community organizations would wish to present to you. The concept of scientific risk and need identification linked to a continuum of quality services provides the ministry with the capacity to maximize community safety and reduce costs at the same time.
The opportunity, I believe, exists to re-examine our correctional strategies. A revised mandate for halfway houses, integrated with a comprehensive release strategy, maximizes resources and promotes public safety. Later, we will allude to opportunities that exist to develop cost-shared linkages with federally funded facilities and enhance a network of available resources and facilities. Modern technology has the potential to complement existing release programs.
A revised system of gradual release, matching offender risk and need to a cost-effective, quality correctional program, is achievable. The strategic re-establishment of halfway houses will help ensure that Ontario has the capacity to meet the challenge of safeguarding its communities.
I'd like to turn it over to Mr Sanderson.
The Chair: Mr Sanderson, we have two minutes of the half-hour, and our next witness, Mr Clinton, has kindly permitted us to encroach in a small amount. If you can do your presentation within two minutes, or three at the most, then we'll have two minutes of questions from each caucus. Is it okay if we proceed that way? Thank you.
Mr William Sanderson: Just to wander off the script then, the script is part of our package here which gives you a more thorough overview of what we have in mind.
Essentially, the St Leonard's Society has submitted a draft proposal to the Ministry of Correctional Services and the Solicitor General to establish and operate an electronic monitoring program for offenders in Ontario. Our basic position is that we feel electronic monitoring may well have a place in the continuum of care that is currently being utilized in the community, providing certain factors and certain goals are kept in mind by the government.
Just as a brief overview, electronic monitoring is an alternative form of incarceration which allows offenders to serve their sentences in the community by wearing an electronic bracelet which transmits a continuous signal to a receiver in the home, and this in turn transmits to a central monitoring device which is a computer. Currently this system has been set up by the ministry on a pilot basis, and the idea is to basically determine the whereabouts of the offender.
The basic concern we would like to bring to your attention or the need issue we'd like to bring to your attention is that the hoped-for result of the program is to reduce crime and create a safer community. We just wanted to make you aware that most of the research to date on electronic monitoring indicates that if you hope to reduce recidivism and increase public safety, electronic monitoring must be accompanied by other community programs, many of which are already being operated by the St Leonard's Society in Ontario now. These programs have, generally speaking, two significant components.
One is that there is some relationship between the programs being operated and the risk and needs these offenders pose for the community. These are things that have been evaluated, such as antisocial attitudes, antisocial associates, criminal history, personality patterns, early behaviour in the home and in the school, and the use of substances.
The second feature of the programs that's important, after the risk and need has been assessed correctly, is that a program generally addressing that level of risk is there. In addition to providing the electronic monitoring, we believe the committee should be aware that other programs, such as family counselling, substance abuse counselling, cognitive skills training, anger management and so on, need to be available to make the program successful.
We are not opposed to electronic monitoring, providing there is a program associated with it and that it is seen as part of a continuum of care, and providing that these programs that accompany it try to address the risk and need of the offenders involved. We feel the St Leonard's Society would be able to assist the community with these programs.
Just to close, I'll give you a brief overview of some of those programs we do offer.
The Chair: Sorry, Mr Sanderson. You're running way over time and we will not have time for questions, if I may stop you there. Each caucus will have two minutes for questioning, which it will be strictly enforced because we are encroaching a little too much on Mr Clinton's time.
Ms Annamarie Castrilli (Downsview): Thank you for coming. I know there's so much to be said on this subject that it's kind of difficult to keep to the time. Since you're dealing with the electronic monitoring program, I'd like to give you the opportunity to round off what you were going to say, very shortly: how you think it'll work, how you think St Leonard's Society can assist in the program.
Mr Sanderson: The reason the St Leonard's Society could help is that it is already, so to speak, in business with the government and has been for many years, providing a variety of related services. For example, we operate young offender residences at present. We operate a very extensive community service order program. We currently provide the intermittent weekend work programs for inmates being released from the institutions. We provide intensive probation and parole supervision. We provide impaired driver awareness and family violence education programs. Many of the people being released to the community are already under supervision and are already being counselled and worked with in the community by people who work for the St Leonard's Society. Basically, the foundation is there, and the relationships with the ministry are there and the funding is in place.
The other advantage is that we have -- and this was alluded to earlier -- a community-rooted organization with volunteer boards of directors who come from a variety of walks of life, who come voluntarily to sit at the meetings every month and basically plot the policies and procedures for the society across the province. There is a voluntarism there and a commitment we can built on and use, rather than recreating the wheel.
Mrs Marion Boyd (London Centre): Thank you all for coming. I really found it very interesting, and of course, having worked a wee bit with St Leonard's in London, really agree with what you were saying, Peter. Elizabeth, you just touched on this, and I wonder if you could expand for us your fear that electronic monitoring may widen the net and therefore cost more in the long run. That has been the experience in some other jurisdictions, hasn't it?
Ms White: There is one particular area of concern for me; that is, I've seen mention of a possibility of using electronic monitoring together with a probation order. Probation orders in this province have grown and grown and grown, with add-ons and add-ons over the last 10 years. To then further add on to them by the addition of an electronic monitor is unnecessary and unnecessarily expensive, in my estimation. If a person is fine to be in the community on an order with certain conditions, they don't need an electronic piece attached to them. That would be the prime example I would make.
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Mr Ron Johnson (Brantford): I want to thank you for your presentation, and a special hello to you, Bill. For those who don't know, Bill's from my riding and we've worked very hard in the past, both on this proposal and others, from this group. I want to congratulate you on the great job you guys do in Brantford.
You've indicated that you have submitted a proposal. Of course I've seen that and we've forwarded that to the ministry. I am one of those who believe we need to look very closely at contracting those types of services out, especially to non-profit groups that have the background and experience. Can you fill us in briefly on what you've done to prepare for this type of initiative, what kind of background and that sort of thing? A quick overview of the kinds of things you've been able to do with respect to the proposal and some of the suggestions.
Mr Sanderson: With respect to the preparation of the proposal itself?
Mr Ron Johnson: Yes.
Mr Sanderson: When we first learned electronic monitoring was possibly coming to Ontario, the St Leonard's Society of Canada sent representatives from our society to various parts of the country and the United States to research the experiences there. Those experiences are fairly well documented now in terms of the program being operated in the United States for quite some time and in British Columbia now for some three years.
We tried to take bits and pieces of what we learned and bring them back and put together the best of what we could find. The essence of what we learned was that you just can't put a bracelet on somebody and expect it to be effective. You have to have a supportive program along with it grounded in solid research about what happens with criminogenic behaviour. That's essentially what we came back with: that you had to have programs which address offenders' needs and risk levels if you expect the program to be successful.
That's really what we wanted to convey in the program, and we believe the St Leonard's Society is able to deliver this because we're already in the community and have been for many years, delivering similar related programs. That was the major thing we did to get ready.
The Chair: Our time is up. I thank you very much for your presentation. It was well received.
ONTARIO HALFWAY HOUSE ASSOCIATION
The Chair: Mr Clinton, on behalf of the Ontario Halfway House Association, we've extravagantly used about eight minutes of your time, but with a little discretion, so I'd ask you to proceed.
Mr John Clinton: Thank you very much. For the record, I'm John Clinton. I'm the vice-president of the Ontario Halfway House Association. The Ontario Halfway House Association is a professional organization made up of representatives from various service providers in the province of Ontario with the mandate of providing services primarily to federal offenders released in this province.
Because it's a professional association, I also have a real job. Probably one of the reasons I was so accommodating to the St Leonard's Society is that I'm the executive director of the St Leonard's Society in Hamilton. I'm following along behind St Leonard's, but in this instance representing the Ontario Halfway House Association.
I'm referring to the brief you've already had presented to you -- no more paper to read -- but I want to put, if I can, a federal slant on that brief and what I see as being the critical issues.
The brief recommends a range of approaches. I want to refer to a document put out by Correctional Services Canada called Contact. It was written the same week that the halfway house closures were announced in Ontario. Quoting from that document, "Halfway houses are a safe and effective way to manage any possible risk to the community that offenders present." It goes on to say, "Because they allow for safe gradual release of offenders to the community, halfway houses are a vital part of the federal correctional process."
It may have been that one of the considerations in the closure of halfway houses was that they were in some instances being underutilized. We've experienced this in the federal circle as well. However, rather than opting to simply get rid of it, we've opted to first try to take a look at the problems of utilization. There are so many barriers to release that people are ending up being warehoused in the institutions who could very well do their time in the community.
I think the brief speaks really well to the fact that the thing we should be trying to do is to not catch everybody up in the most expensive and least effective part of the system. Any research, which we've all looked at, seems to show that: that the institution gobbles up all the money yet there's nothing to support that it really does anything other than provide a very limited temporary solution and in fact is destructive because of the dehumanizing effects of incarceration; that we have to bear some responsibility for releasing people back into our communities who are worse off than when they came in.
My recommendation is that we should have addressed what the barriers to release were. In the federal system, we also took a look at funding issues connected to that so that taxpayers aren't funding unused resources. Also, we should have explored and encouraged -- and this is where I really want to drive with my presentation -- cooperative use.
I really believe that if you took a representative from Mars and brought him to Ontario and tried to explain the correctional system, with some federal and some provincial, they'd go, "You do what?" It's awfully confusing for us to understand. It's awfully confusing for us to explain it to any other person. What we really ought to be doing during these times of constraint, these times where we have to examine effective use of our resources, is taking a look at how we can work together, how we can cooperate.
At this juncture, while we are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I don't believe the baby is gone yet. There is already a structure of halfway houses in place; some of the halfway houses that were closed are still available. And in order for some of the reforms the government is proposing and for electronic monitoring to be effective, we need to have resources in the community.
There are federal halfway houses out there that were affected by the loss of provincial contracts. We all know that small isn't very effective, that a larger halfway house can operate more effectively, provide a broader variety of services and do it more cost-effectively. We could now be exploring the use of existing resources out there in ways in which we could join services together, piggyback only one set of administrative charges, and all kinds of experience and knowledge could be provided to the offenders.
I just have a couple more points and then I'll be happy to entertain your questions.
I believe the first criteria we should be trying to establish are not to criminalize the unnecessary, and the first stage would be to not put people into the system who don't need to be there; that we use resources where they make the most sense, and incarceration really only makes sense when somehow the public is at risk; that we don't allow local communities not to own part of this problem of corrections. This may be the best way to change the current public attitude towards the offender. It's being driven now by fear and ignorance, and fear and ignorance are, I believe, what's driving the current political agendas. It's only reasonable that you as politicians are trying to be responsive to the electorate.
But halfway houses, because they're managed by community volunteers, are ways for the public to become involved in correctional issues, ways for them to gain insight, knowledge and information into the offender and those kinds of programs and services that work. We all know that the offenders whom we speak about are going to come back into our community. They're going to live there again, and it only makes reasonable sense for us to make decisions with that knowledge always held firmly before us. I don't believe that we should make the mistake of somehow continuing to tell the public that the police and the courts and the prisons can take care of this problem on their own, that all we need now is a little bit of electronic monitoring; just give us your money and we'll fix the problem.
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This is a community problem. These are members of the community. They don't come from Mars. We need to involve the community in correctional issues. Halfway houses are a good vehicle to do that. Halfway houses should be expanded to be considered not just residential centres but true resource centres in the community to provide a variety of services.
The question before us now, as I conclude, is -- that we come to our senses on this -- will the resources still be there when we finally come to our senses about what we really need?
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Clinton. We have five minutes per caucus and we would start with Ms Boyd.
Mrs Boyd: Thank you very much for your presentation. Some of the methods that you were talking about whereby this continuum of justice could be developed and cost savings in fact realized were presented to the government prior to the closing of the halfway houses, but as I understand it, there was no discussion with you of those suggestions and no real effort to look at implementing some of those suggestions.
Mr Clinton: Not meaning to speak for the service providers who are delivering provincial programs, my understanding is that the closures came very suddenly, without consultation, without exploring whether there were options in fact that could be used, if there was a problem, to find alternative ways to continue the service, keeping the good parts of what was working, and if necessary, only getting rid of the things that were ineffective and not working. I don't think any of us have any difficulties with the system becoming more effective.
Mrs Boyd: And you do feel very strongly that there are ways, if the federal and provincial corrections ministries were working more closely together, to achieve the kind of community-based service for the appropriate group of convicted people in a much more effective way?
Mr Clinton: Yes, and I believe that there are examples of that where it's already being done, and I turn to the Elizabeth Fry Society as an example of organizations that have joined together and provided services for federally sentenced women as well as provincially sentenced women. You can see why that would have happened. There are by contrast a lot fewer women in the system and it would not be possible for houses to operate if there weren't some sharing of services.
Mrs Boyd: I think we had the only one, the Proudfoot House, which was I think only for eight women. I agree with you. I think there ways that could happen and it could expand to the group that is specifically best helped through that kind of service, and that crosses over whether it's two years plus a day or two years minus a day.
Mr Clinton: Minus a day; right.
Mr David Tilson (Dufferin-Peel): I think the proposal is that you qualify for electronic monitoring if you're 180 days or under either time served and that the average is around -- what? -- 60 days?
Mr Clinton: I'm not the expert on electronic monitoring.
Mr Tilson: The question I have is, when we talk about community programming, counselling, other such services, why do we need bricks and mortar? Why do we need buildings? In other words, I assume that many of the halfway houses will have programs within those facilities. But is that necessary, particularly when you hear some of the -- and we've heard communications from experiments in British Columbia and Florida -- comments that electronic monitoring keeps the prisoners from living under the influence of other criminals, allowing offenders to continue to work and support their families and therefore eases the strain on social assistance programs.
My question really in short is, why do we need bricks and mortar to rehabilitate or to attempt to provide some sort of rehabilitation or counselling to criminals or offenders?
Mr Clinton: I think it's a great question, because I think it really helps to point out that it's not a black and white issue. It's not that we need one or the other. I believe that halfway houses may in fact be the best vehicles turned into not just residential centres but to resource centres in the community, to provide the additional services that those people who don't require a residence require. I can envision as a resource centre that some people may not need electronic monitoring but they might just need to check into a resource centre on a regular basis and perhaps receive programming or treatment that might assist them and that others may in fact need electronic monitoring but that they too should have some assistance, something to help meet the deficits that otherwise are only going to cause them to reoffend as soon as we take the bracelet off.
Mr Tilson: So is your recommendation that there be a mix?
Mr Clinton: My recommendation is that there be a mix, that we have a broad spectrum of resources available and that we use the existing abilities we have to assess people and ensure that they go into the right resources for them.
The Chair: You've got about a minute.
Mr Tilson: The previous people who came to us from St Leonard's House talked about special-needs people -- I don't know where my notes are. Can you give us any indication as to what percentage of people in the system, as far as halfway houses are concerned around the province, fall into that category?
Mr Clinton: My understanding currently is we're talking about 15% special-needs clients in the province.
Mr Tilson: How much does that cost? There's got to be a rather unusual cost for those types of people.
Mr Clinton: There's a huge cost to it. They don't tend to respond very well to the existing systems; they get lost inside. The actual dollar figure, if you took 15% of the correctional budget, you'd get a picture of a group of people who don't really belong in the system. The correctional system has always been referred to as the bottom of the catch net. When they don't fit in anywhere else, they get arrested and turned over to the jail system to look after.
Mr Tilson: I guess that's the problem with whether we're talking halfway houses, electronic monitoring, all of the different many people who are in it, is what's the best way to attempt to rehabilitate people, the best economical way to rehabilitate people, because you haven't got that long a period of time. You've got, I suppose -- and I don't know; that's why I was hoping you could tell me -- but my speculation is that you've got a minimum of 60 and on up to 180. That's not a great deal of time to try and rehabilitate people.
Mr Clinton: No, and in fact that's also a great question, because it points out the major flaw in our whole system. That is that we constantly fixate on the notion of rehabilitation, the very definition of which means to return them to the state from which they came, which is probably, when you think about it, the last thing that we want to be doing. Rehabilitation is a wonderful term if it's used in the health model, where a person is ill and you want to return them to their former state of wellness. Used in the application that we use it in corrections, rehabilitation is used basically in the model of driving the devil out of them, and it's a punitive model. We believe the correctional system will scare people into behaving and there's no research anywhere that will support it as being effective.
The model that we want to use is a model that addresses more the cause of problems. We are finding people are breaking the law and they have certain deficits, they have need for substance abuse treatment, they have cognitive deficits that cause them not to be able to problem-solve and strategize. We should forget for a minute our need for retribution, because unless retribution will get us an effective result, all we're doing is continually making a problem worse. We're bringing people into a system modelled after rehabilitation, dehumanizing them, then releasing them back into our communities and somehow thinking we're better off when in fact we've just made the problem worse and we've spent a lot of money doing it.
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Mr David Ramsay (Timiskaming): Thank you, Mr Clinton, for coming. I hope what you and the previous presenters have said today is maybe finally starting to get through to some of the government members. It seems to me, from the first two presentations today, what you're really saying is that we're turning back the clock when it comes to corrections. For the government to say that electronic monitoring can be a substitute for what you do and what we, collectively, have developed in transition support and housing for offenders over the last 50 years is absolutely ridiculous; it's comparing apples and oranges.
I, like most in the correctional field, am very interested in electronic monitoring, but not as a substitute for the work that you do. You stated a phrase, I think, that really sums it up: that what we should be building is a continuum of justice. I see electronic monitoring as a part of that. But I also see the halfway houses, the community resource centres, as that. If you really look at what electronic monitoring is, it's just a very fancy, modern, high-tech form of incarceration. It's only incarceration; it doesn't supply the offender with anything else.
You, in your work, supply offenders with a total support package that provides a little bit of supervision but much support. I think most people who have familiarity with the people on the other side of the correction system understand it and, as you've stated today, need support; that it's not just punishing people that's going to bring them around, but it's having, first of all, some empathy for their problems, but also giving them some expertise in how to deal with those problems so they won't be acting out in an improper fashion. You've really crystallized that for us, and I hope that the government members see that what you're saying and what you're providing to the correctional system is very, very valuable.
The Chair: You were most efficient, Mr Clinton. I have a point of clarification. You talked about greater cooperation between the federal and the provincial. I take it you were referring only to halfway houses and not to institutions, where you'd have a mingling of those over two years and those under two years?
Mr Clinton: Well, the point of clarification being I'm not sure that I wanted to speak to the institutional side of it, although I do think I made reference to the fact that an arbitrary decision at two years doesn't really make a whole lot of sense and that if we're going to explore efficiencies, maybe we should put everything on the table and acknowledge the fact that there are administrative charges and bricks and mortar which are expensive and resources that are out there that could be piggybacked and dovetailed and made extremely efficient by getting together and working on this in a cooperative way.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation; most valuable.
ONTARIO PROVINCIAL POLICE
The Chair: Our next presenter is Superintendent Chris Wyatt of the Ontario Provincial Police. Welcome, Superintendent. The procedure is that you have one half-hour, which includes all questions. So I'd ask you to proceed.
Mr Chris Wyatt: Thank you very much, sir. I propose just to make a few brief comments and then attempt to answer any questions that you may have. I believe you all have a document that I sent to the secretary of the committee.
I'm the commander of the OPP's Operational Policy and Support Bureau. In that role we are responsible for research, planning and policy development related to operational policing matters; for example, what procedure police officers should follow in death investigations. When we're requested to review and provide feedback on initiatives from one of our partners in the justice system, we try to stick to two basic criteria: How does it affect public safety, and what are the resource impacts?
In reviewing electronic monitoring, the program as it is in the correctional services division of the Ministry of the Solicitor General and Correctional Services, we use those two general criteria.
The OPP believes that with the guidelines and procedures currently used in the program, public safety is not adversely affected and may even be enhanced for the following reasons:
The criteria for selecting individuals -- for non-violent offenders, for example, that there be a suitable living environment -- we believe are sufficiently rigorous to provide a high level of confidence that high-risk offenders are not taken into the program.
We believe that the level of supervision is at least as great as or probably better than was the case in CRCs. In addition, there is supervision provided by ministry staff.
The technology has been tested over a wide period of time and in many jurisdictions and has been found to be more than adequate to the purpose.
There is immediate notification where an offender has not abided by the set schedule, and this enables ministry staff and the police, where required, to take action in a timely manner.
We believe that electronic monitoring better allows offenders to retain employment. One research study indicates a higher rate of employment retention of offenders on electronic monitoring over halfway houses.
With electronic monitoring, offenders are able to live with and maintain ties to those who have a stake in the program: those in their residence. This requirement to some degree removes the offender from a criminal milieu, which we believe is a significant contributing factor in recidivism.
As the program has only recently been introduced, there are very limited data to estimate the resource impacts on police, and in particular the OPP. However, given the rigorous selection requirements, we don't expect those resource impacts to exceed those expended when CRCs were being used.
We believe that electronic monitoring has the potential to evolve and yield even greater benefits in the following areas:
In the cases of domestic violence, EM could warn the victim of the presence of the perpetrator.
It could be enhanced to include an alcohol testing component. This would be a very effective method of supervision for those offenders who have a drinking problem.
It could be enhanced to include global positioning technology. This could be a very valuable investigative aid where an offender is a suspect in a crime.
The expansion of electronic monitoring to offenders on bail has the potential to reduce the resources, which are considerable, expended by police on prisoner transportation.
These are all my comments. I'd be pleased to answer any questions you may have.
Mr Tilson: Superintendent Wyatt, thank you for your presentation.
Tell us a little bit about halfway houses. In particular some of the concern that seems to come out is whether electronic monitoring is safe, and you've given some examples, that the issue of alcohol and the issue of domestic violence may alert that there are problems. Can you tell us a little bit about the converse, the issue of safety with respect to halfway houses and how much of a problem, if any, there has been?
Mr Wyatt: In our view, it really comes down to an issue of who's in the halfway houses, what criteria are used to determine who is in that halfway house. In terms of provincial offenders who are in the halfway houses, the OPP information is that we've had very little problem with that program. That doesn't speak to the federal program, of course, which has been a different experience.
Mr Tilson: Maybe that's my lack of knowledge. I've read of problems with halfway houses -- quite the contrary -- that there have been problems with security and difficulties, but you're saying if there have been any, they've been with respect to federal houses as opposed to provincial houses?
Mr Wyatt: Yes, sir.
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Mr Tilson: The issue I'd like you to talk about is the concept, from your knowledge, of offenders being able to work and support their families. That has been outlined as a positive with respect to electronic monitoring. Can you elaborate on that?
Mr Wyatt: I don't have any quantitative data, but my colleagues and I feel that a person with a job has a stake in the community. In investigating criminal offences, we find one common denominator of criminality is that the person usually is unemployed or not permanently employed.
Mr Tilson: On the issue of cost, the figures put out by the ministry are obviously estimated costs: $22 per diem per offender on electronic monitoring versus $80 per diem per offender with respect to halfway houses. Do you have any thoughts as to how reliable those estimates are?
Mr Wyatt: I couldn't make any comment about those figures, really.
Mr Tilson: The reason I say that -- they are just estimates, obviously, because they haven't happened, but there's the issue of savings that can be reallocated -- you may have mentioned that -- to deal with more serious offences and offenders who are at greater risk. I don't know whether you have any position on that.
Mr Wyatt: Certainly we'd like to see resources targeted towards the more serious offences, and if this initiative can do that, so much the better.
Mr Ed Doyle (Wentworth East): Thank you very much for appearing today. This question relates a little to what Mr Tilson asked you concerning employment. You had mentioned here that research studies indicate "a higher rate of employment retention of offenders on electronic monitoring as opposed to people in halfway houses." That interests me. Have you had much of a chance to find out any statistics in this regard?
Mr Wyatt: I haven't examined the statistical evidence. This is one research study that I'm referring to, and I believe the Deputy Solicitor General referred to that in her appearance before the committee. I'm not a big stats guy, so when I see these elaborate statistical models I have a hard time interpreting them, but I can generally follow the text.
Mr Doyle: I think that's important. If people can maintain employment better, this is the key to any program, actually.
Mr Wyatt: I think most police would totally agree with the statement that a job is essential to preventing criminality.
Mr Doyle: You've had a lot of discussion with your peers on this topic, I would imagine.
Mr Wyatt: Yes. We had a very heated discussion about the causes of criminality and what we as the police think is the major contributing cause. One thing I was able to distil out of this heated conversation was that employment is a key factor.
Mr Doyle: I would have to agree with that.
The Chair: Mr Parker, we have two more minutes, if you had any questions.
Mr John L. Parker (York East): Maybe that gives me the time I need to address this point. Did I understand you to indicate that you are satisfied that electronic monitoring does a satisfactory job of keeping track of offenders involved in the program?
Mr Wyatt: Yes.
Mr Parker: As good a job as a halfway house program would do?
Mr Wyatt: Yes.
Mr Parker: Let's just take it as a given that electronic monitoring is cheaper than a halfway house. I'm not asking you to comment on that, but let's just take the presumption that it is cheaper. Would you rather see the additional dollars go into improved programs for offenders or into building walls and roofs and bricks and mortar to house offenders?
Mr Wyatt: The choice is between bricks and mortar --
Mr Parker: What I'm getting at is, if we can assume that there's a saving to be achieved by keeping track of our offenders by electronic means rather than putting them behind walls, can you see some potential for those savings to be put to more effective use than to building walls and homes for offenders?
Mr Wyatt: This reminds me -- if you'll pardon me for digressing -- of being cross-examined by a crown attorney who was trying to get a yes or no answer out of me.
Mr Tilson: A judge probably wouldn't allow that question.
Mr Wyatt: I'm not sure I can say, because there are so many different factors involved, that I prefer this over that. What I want to see and what the police would want to see is what prevents criminal behaviour. If one works best, that's what we want to do.
Mr Parker: I'll put it this way: Is it the bricks and mortar that do an effective job of preventing criminal behaviour or are there other areas where the investment would be more effectively addressed?
Mr Wyatt: I can't give you a straightforward answer, sir. I'm sorry.
Ms Castrilli: Superintendent, thank you for coming. I must say I'm absolutely surprised by your presentation. You are, I believe, the first witness who has made these kinds of assertions. Everyone before you has indicated that while there is a place for electronic monitoring, it should be used as part of a continuum, as part of a whole series of measures in the criminal justice area. I just want to make sure I understood you correctly. Are you saying that electronic monitoring is a substitute for halfway houses?
Mr Wyatt: I don't purport to be an expert in correctional theory.
Ms Castrilli: Fair enough.
Mr Wyatt: When you ask, is one more effective than the other, I don't have a lot of background in that area to evaluate effectiveness. I came here today to talk about the merits of this particular program and not whether it could replace some other program. That's why I couldn't give Mr Parker a straightforward answer.
Ms Castrilli: That's very important, because your presentation leaves some doubt as to what you're saying with respect to other methods of surveillance.
Mr Wyatt: Other methods may be equally valid.
Ms Castrilli: Okay. That's very helpful to know. I know you're not an expert, but I assume you're speaking on behalf of the association and you therefore must have some contacts outside. Are you aware of any jurisdiction where electronic monitoring is used exclusively?
Mr Wyatt: No, I'm not aware of where it's used exclusively.
Ms Castrilli: Would it surprise you to know that our evidence is that there aren't any, that wherever there is electronic monitoring, other measures are also used? We had testimony last week from the state of Florida which indicated that a substantial number of people on electronic monitoring had their programs terminated because they violated electronic monitoring. I wonder if you might comment on that in light of your assertion that this is an effective method. Other jurisdictions aren't so sure.
Mr Wyatt: Are you speaking from a policing perspective?
Ms Castrilli: I'm talking simply from a statistics perspective.
Mr Wyatt: From a public safety perspective I don't know. From a policing perspective, there's a device that's checking every three seconds that in our view is superior to somebody doing a visual once every who knows how often. In our view, the electronic device doing the checking over some person doing the checking in a CRC has got to be superior.
Ms Castrilli: Remember that in jurisdictions such as Florida there are obviously some difficulties, because even with this fail-proof mechanism there were people taken off the program and taken to jail because they violated it. It's not as effective as it would appear, and we had evidence from a whole series of coalitions, community organizations, that do not believe, as you do, that there are studies that speak to the effectiveness of electronic monitoring; it's inconclusive as yet what the data will show. The gentleman from Florida also told us that it's still too early to say how effective this will be.
Mr Wyatt: Is that because there were problems with it?
Mr Tilson: He didn't say that.
Ms Castrilli: Sure he did. I think if you check Hansard, it's exactly what he said: "The data are too recent and I can't comment."
Mr Wyatt: I would say, just from our perspective, that the technology appears to have a higher degree of reliability than human observation. In that sense, when the individual is supposed to be at his residence or the CRC, that level of supervision is higher using electronic monitoring than it is with correctional staff.
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Ms Castrilli: Your position is that to the extent you have to monitor individuals, this is one way you would want to see in place, and you express no opinion on halfway houses or on the purposes they might have, such as rehabilitation, such as facilitating entry into society and that sort of thing?
Mr Wyatt: No, I make no judgement as to one being superior to the other.
Ms Castrilli: Terrific. Thank you very much.
The Chair: Superintendent, Mr Parker, the first to cross-examine you, is a lawyer, and Ms Castrilli is also an able lawyer, so you must feel right at home.
Mr Wyatt: I feel like my whole career has been like that, sir.
Ms Castrilli: If I may say, I wasn't trying to cross-examine you, Superintendent. I was just trying to understand what it is that you were telling us.
The Chair: Mrs Boyd, who is next, is not a lawyer; however, she is the former Attorney General of Ontario.
Mr Wyatt: We've met before.
Mrs Boyd: We've worked together before, for sure.
I'm really interested. It seems to me that what you say about risk control issues, which is obviously your primary concern here, is quite true. I think all of us were impressed by the risk management tool that the ministry is trying to use and the way they're trying to do that. I don't think, as long as those criteria are in place and that tool is used appropriately, I have as much concern about risk control in terms of using electronic monitoring.
What I do worry about is that I think we want to do more than just control the risk. We want to reduce the risk. One of the real issues with electronic monitoring is whether it is a tool that's going to allow us to reduce that risk and help people to become more connected into the community.
I would agree with you that being employed is an important factor of being connected into the community and that having that as one of the criteria, that someone has a job to go to, something that gives some structure and shape to their lives, is a really important part of helping that risk reduction for them. But it may not be very realistic for a lot of people, even in the provincial system. It certainly wouldn't be realistic for a lot of people in the federal system, because they would have been out of society for long enough that getting them a job even when they come out on mandatory supervision is often an extraordinarily difficult task.
I'm kind of curious. You said in answer to Mr Tilson's question that as far as you knew, the OPP had not had any real difficulty with provincial halfway houses. That certainly is my sense, that all the celebrated cases of risk have been either the federal situation or young offenders' closed facilities, which is the other area. Is that your understanding? I live in a town that had lots of these, and I don't remember any.
Mr Wyatt: That's our experience.
Mrs Boyd: So when you say they may get better supervision through EM than through a halfway house, you're talking strictly about knowing where they are. Obviously, you don't know what they're doing, but you do know where they are, and there are those celebrated cases where people deal drugs and beat up their wives and all sorts of things, even though they're where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be. That's a different kind of risk, isn't it?
Mr Wyatt: Yes.
Mrs Boyd: On your second page, you talk about how this could be enhanced. On the alcohol testing component, they do that in BC; they have the hand-held breathalyser and they do that. We saw demonstrated to us equipment that would do that through voice-activated blowing right onsite and so on. I agree with you: I think that's a necessary enhancement, because we know how often alcohol is a risk factor in those things.
But in terms of your number 1, where you talk about domestic violence, we've been around this one in terms of the early warning things and trying to protect people. The real problem here is that the police still have to be able to get there in time, and the range of these devices is not very big at this point in time, so I expect you're really looking at a future enhancement on that?
Mr Wyatt: Yes. It would be nice that in these cases of domestic violence the alarm would go off if the offender came within three miles; that would give the police the opportunity for response.
Mrs Boyd: But it's usually 300 yards, isn't it?
Mr Wyatt: Yes, and of course in an OPP area, it's a very low-density type of population and sometimes it takes us an hour to get to a call.
Mrs Boyd: I know, and that's what caused us the trouble in the celebrated case in Elgin county, isn't it? It really was that kind of problem, that by the time you get the warning, the response time is a difficulty.
When you talk about expansion in terms of global positioning and in terms of the bail issue, these are not things, I gather, that are being looked at now. Would you expect there to be a lot of objection to the positioning technology in terms of violating people's human rights?
Mr Wyatt: We would expect there would be a charter argument against that as being unduly intrusive.
Mrs Boyd: Most of your surveillance things face that challenge, don't they?
Mr Wyatt: Yes. There are a lot of things that police like that other people see as unduly intrusive.
Mrs Boyd: I can't understand that.
Mr Wyatt: I can't understand it either. If I understand this, it's a voluntary program?
Mrs Boyd: Yes.
Mr Wyatt: That may be a remedy in that area.
Mrs Boyd: That may be the way around it, or it may be that if the signal isn't beeping, it switches, because there's an automatic offence at that point. There may be ways around that.
On the bail thing, as C-41 comes in and there's more release by police officers onsite and so on, I wouldn't think you would see this as a function of that; I would think you would see this as a function of releases only through a justice of the peace with conditions. Or would you see it being done at the station in terms of conditional releases by police?
Mr Wyatt: No. We would see that condition being put on by a judge or a JP.
Mrs Boyd: So a very specific kind of a condition to ensure that everything was looked at at the same time.
Mr Wyatt: We would want a judicial review.
Mrs Boyd: In summary, just to be really clear, you're saying you think electronic monitoring is going to help you in your job for a certain number of clients who fit into that particular category that's there in terms of risk assessment and that you could see it being enhanced down the line to further improve that, but you really can't see it being something that would be available to people who, for example, have committed murder or have committed sexual assaults, that sort of thing?
Mr Wyatt: Yes, we agree.
Mrs Boyd: I think they did in Florida too, but have a surprising number of people in those categories as a result of early resolution.
Mr Wyatt: A person appeared before this committee, Mr Cairns, from British Columbia, who I thought was very wise when he advocated a cautious approach. We would tend to agree with that.
Mrs Boyd: That's what the police would like?
Mr Wyatt: Yes.
Mrs Boyd: Just one last clarification: You're not representing the association here today, are you? You're representing the commander.
Mr Wyatt: I'm representing the commissioner today.
The Chair: Superintendent Wyatt, thank you for attending and sharing your expertise with us today.
AMERICAN PROBATION AND PAROLE ASSOCIATION
The Chair: Our next presenter is Mr Don Evans on behalf of the American Probation and Parole Association.
Just before Mr Evans starts, you should have received approximately 14 pages, the conclusions of the University of Maryland thesis referred to by the deputy minister. We do have all 160 pages; if anyone wishes them, please do not hesitate to ask the clerk.
Mrs Boyd: Could we borrow it, Mr Chair, rather than having the cost of duplication? That would probably be our best bet, wouldn't it?
The Chair: Fine. Excuse me, Mr Evans.
Mr Donald Evans: No problem. Thank you for the opportunity of appearing before you on the matter you have before your committee. In the interests of time, I intend to go through the first couple of pages of my presentation rather quickly. You can read that at your leisure, summarizing the association I represent.
I'd like to draw your attention to our position that we think there are some basic principles for effective community programs that ought to be adhered to, and I'll just refer to those in the bold points.
Crime is a community problem. Informal social controls are the most effective method of reducing crime. Community involvement should be encouraged to the maximum extent possible. Networking and collaboration are necessary to significantly impact crime and maximize agency operations.
Therefore, the first comment I would make about the decision to close halfway houses and substitute electronic monitoring is related to the need to develop effective community networks for offenders. The possible loss of community agency support, through their boards and volunteers etc, may be the more significant loss to community corrections in Ontario. The American Probation and Parole Association notes that in almost every jurisdiction in the United States, correctional agencies are seeking ways to enlarge community support and in this manner increase their operational capacity.
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Second, in the United States there is a shift in the use of residential programs. The trend is towards more structured programming for offenders under community supervision and includes probation detention, restitution centres, and attendance or day reporting centres, that is, halfway-in programs. There has also been a move to develop what I refer to as halfway-back residential services for offenders committing technical violations of probation and parole. There is a decline in the use of community residential facilities for early release from prison programs.
Third, the capacity of a correctional system to adequately assess and classify its offender population is crucial to the effective use of correctional resources. As you will have already noted from the current ministry, its use of the LSI-OR is consistent with this trend to identify risk levels of offenders as well as the factors that, if addressed, would lower the risk level and thus provide for enhanced public safety. It should also be noted that the research in this area is consistent in demonstrating that resources are best used with offenders at higher risk levels than many who are now under community supervision. The research also shows that you get an opposite effect if you provide intensive services to lower-risk populations; that is, you actually increase the risk of reoffending. More correctional agencies are beginning to take note of this research and design their interventions accordingly.
Fourth, with regard to electronic monitoring, earlier research results were unclear about the effectiveness of electronic home confinement in reducing reoffending. Most of the studies suggested that offenders on electronic home confinement fared no worse than those serving other community sanctions.
Reoffending rates were improved when electronic monitoring was combined with other program interventions, for example, drug treatment for substance abuse offenders. There is evidence that electronic monitoring became more effective when combined with other rehabilitative programs. A recent ruling by the New York State Court of Appeals stated that conditions of probation such as electronic monitoring must be "fundamentally rehabilitative." The court found that electronic monitoring could only be used to advance the offender's rehabilitation.
Most jurisdictions look to electronic monitoring as a means to reduce costs, and if used appropriately it can be cost-effective. However, using electronic monitoring with low-risk offenders who could do as well on parole or other release programs undermines its ability to save money and leads to overprovision of services, thus eventually increasing costs. Also, as I noted earlier, providing intensive services such as electronic monitoring to low-risk offenders has been found to increase recidivism rates, further increasing costs. Electronic monitoring is cost-effective when used on moderate- and high-risk offenders and coupled with appropriate correctional interventions that target specific criminogenic factors.
Correctional administrators often speak of prison beds as finite resources and argue that they should be used for those who need them most. If the justice system were a capitalist economy, the supply of offender placements would adjust to the changing demand, shortages would be short-lived, and competition would create innovation and cost efficiency. But of course the criminal justice system is not a capitalist economy. It is a loosely interconnected system of bureaucracies with responsibilities purposely divided between independent levels and departments of government.
Using the metaphor of a capitalist economy to help describe our system of offender placements has its limitations. On the other hand, it does provide some insight. For example, offenders are in one sense the consumers of the supply of offender placements, but they are not the purchasers. The purchase decision, the decisions about which offenders go to which placements, are made by police officers, crowns, judges. If those responsible for placement purchases were real consumers, they would make their choices and pay real money, but this is not the case. The placements do cost real money, but to the purchasers they usually are free. As in all situations where the decision to consume is divorced from its cost consequences, purchasers make decisions for reasons other than cost.
On the supply side, providers of offender placements often display attributes of centrally planned economies, including risk aversion, adherence to tradition, limited knowledge of consumer needs and motivations unrelated to cost or quality.
The challenge to government is to devise ways to allocate scarce resources in a way that is economical and that meets the objectives we as a society set for our system of offender placements. To accomplish this, it will be necessary to balance short-term and long-term objectives. In the short term, police officers, crowns and judges are concerned about the safety of the community and about other issues relating to how the criminal justice system works. In the long term, the primary objective for our system of offender placements should be to help make our society safer and find ways of reducing reoffending.
To accomplish these aims, it must be recognized that there are things that offender placements can do, things that they could do better and things that they cannot do. Recognition of what it is we are trying to accomplish and what it is that can be accomplished with offender placements is the foundation upon which a rational use of offender placements can be built.
In conclusion, I would like to remind the committee that there tend to be two approaches to the current crisis of crowding and limited resources in our correctional systems. The first approach adopts a population management strategy and seeks to find ways to return offenders to the community as quickly and as cheaply as possible. It focuses on offering only supervision strategies and stresses compliance. It works on the short term but does little to reduce reoffending and thus fails to impact adequately longer-term costs. In other words, it leads only to risk-control strategies.
The second approach adopts an offender management strategy that seeks to restore the offender to the community. It focuses on supervision combined with rehabilitation programs that aim to reduce reoffending, thus impacting longer-term costs to the whole criminal justice system, or, if you like, a risk-reduction strategy. The American Probation and Parole Association is finding that this latter approach is showing promise and that it is also more likely to be effective when done in partnership with local community agencies.
Improving the correctional system is a developmental process; any change must be designed to facilitate future reforms that will necessarily follow. If we are to improve our odds, we need to simultaneously provide for lifestyle interventions, satisfy retributive concerns and provide for effective monitoring of offenders in community settings. This would be possible in Ontario through the appropriate use of electronic monitoring and treatment interventions done in partnership with community agencies.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We have approximately eight minutes. Ms Castrilli.
Ms Castrilli: Mr Evans, you made a number of very striking points which I wonder if you might elaborate on for me. The first is that most of the studies you've seen suggest that offenders on electronic monitoring "fared no worse than those serving...community sanctions." I wonder if you might tell us a little more about that.
Mr Evans: There are two things that go to that; one is that there's a tendency to use it for fairly low-risk offender categories, so in a sense you have targeted the wrong group and you're wasting your money. They could do just as well on an unescorted temporary absence, let out earlier, just as well on parole or just as well being on probation and never in jail in the first place.
Ms Castrilli: So you don't think there is any evidence that those community sanctions would be violated. Is that what you're saying?
Mr Evans: Yes.
Ms Castrilli: Okay. I'm also interested in the New York case. I find that fascinating because I guess we're looking at electronic monitoring as something separate from rehabilitation. That seems to be the gist of this. Yet, if I understand this correctly, electronic monitoring is almost defined by the court as another means of rehabilitation because it has to be coupled with rehabilitation for it to work. Is that right?
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Mr Evans: Yes. In other words, if it doesn't lead to something being done for the individual that would aid him in his rehabilitation, then the court is unhappy with it.
Ms Castrilli: Is it unconstitutional?
Mr Evans: No, because this was a New York ruling. It hasn't been tested any further yet. It just came out in April.
Ms Castrilli: Was the electronic monitoring vacated as a result?
Mr Evans: I think what happened in New York state is that they're attempting now to add other program elements.
Ms Castrilli: Did the court give any indication as to how that might be implemented?
Mr Evans: Yes, adding drug treatment if it's a drug case; adding life skills, employment development programs if employment was a factor in their being in trouble; education if that was a problem. There are a number of ways that they would go at it.
Ms Castrilli: So in and of itself, electronic monitoring should not stand.
Mr Evans: Yes.
Ms Castrilli: Unless it's for those very low-risk offenders where it would make no difference.
Mr Evans: The argument is, why put low-risk offenders on it?
Ms Castrilli: Exactly. You also talk about citizen participation in your paper. I wonder if you might comment on what you mean by that specifically.
Mr Evans: I mean that there should be far more involvement of the local neighbourhoods, community groups, everything involved in helping restore people to the community. I think the danger is that all correctional systems have sort of divorced themselves from communities and have not found ways to work with communities in helping people understand and doing general fear reduction strategies with them.
I think it would be very helpful if there was far more involvement of community groups. The state has taken upon itself a lot of responsibility it cannot deliver.
Ms Castrilli: Just following that for a minute, do you think that electronic monitoring might give communities a false sense of security that something is being done somewhere?
Mr Evans: Putting people in prison for a long time is giving them a false sense of security, given the recidivism rates of people coming out of prison. It could. I think that's why public education would be an absolutely important thing to do, because unless you're doing something with that offender that helps to attach him to that community, simply returning him to the community and knowing whether he's there or not there is not a terribly insightful thing to do.
Ms Castrilli: Would your conclusion be, on the basis of what you've said here, that electronic monitoring, unless exercised in conjunction with other measures, might in fact lead to longer-term costs for society, and what might those be?
Mr Evans: I think the reoffending rates won't necessarily change, so you've constantly got the person coming back. You're not doing anything to intervene in their lifestyle that changes them or turns them around. Simple incapacitation only works while you're incapacitated. It has a very small percentage. The best research indicates that most of our sanctioning processes have no deterrent effect. Once we get the fact that any kind of just punishment notions have only marginal responses, the sooner we can turn to doing something serious about the problem, and that cannot be done unless we involve communities.
Mrs Boyd: Thank you, Don, for sharing with us still your expertise. It's good to see you, and I thank you for participating in this.
One of the things you say in your brief that interested me was that you think actually sometimes putting very low-risk offenders in a situation of supervision in a CRC kind of setting could in fact be worse. Could you explain that a little bit? I think I know what you mean, but I'd be interested in hearing.
Mr Evans: These are persons who are very low risk to reoffend in terms of their behaviour and/or of their needs, because we know so little about what it means to give somebody permission to be slightly free and what this might psychologically do to people as they lose a certain amount of self-determination.
We have found that generally speaking, because the rules and standards we've set for the administering of all these programs slowly become somewhat inflexible, you tend to get someone who you would really worry about being 10, 15, 20 minutes late on curfew as being problematic slowly building a record because his own offence categories and what he did to get him in trouble aren't all that serious and it's hard for him to equate the amount of supervision and surveillance you're giving him over against what he did. The technical violation rights begin to build, and the more people get introduced into the criminal justice system, unfortunately, the longer they stay with us.
Mrs Boyd: I'd like to just emphasize what you say. I have watched that happen in a facility in our area where a provincial judge believed that was where people ought to be. In fact, under any other circumstances they would have been released into the community without supervision. I watched exactly that happen. So that's the other side of that inappropriate placement that has been rather difficult. When people in the field talk about inappropriate placement in our provincial system, they're mostly talking about too much supervision for the particular case, aren't they?
Mr Evans: Yes.
Mrs Boyd: I'm very interested in your challenge that government needs to look at the way to deal with the continuum of the system, and you and I have talked about this before, that unless there is some stake for judges and for prosecutors, and indeed for defence lawyers increasingly as we come to early resolution in this whole thing, then we're in difficulty, aren't we? And you're right, they are like a purchaser who has no stake.
Mr Evans: It's unfortunate that the debate here is about the closing of halfway houses and the introduction of electronic monitoring for, what?, less than 1% of the total provincial offender population. In terms of a placement strategy, there are so many other things that need to be done.
I'd be much more concerned as a public citizen as to what's happening with the 85% to 87% of people under supervision in the environment now and what's happening to them, what kind of program interventions are happening there. How well is the utilization of the assessment instrument there detecting risks and what are we doing about risk reduction strategies?
I'd be much more interested in ways of deflecting people from the criminal justice system so that scarce resources are used for those people that I know full well we can only incapacitate and keep away for very long periods of time, instead of being all bunched up with a lot of mid-range people who make it difficult for us.
The American system is very instructive this way. They are going to use very expensive services and resources for large numbers of people who are not particularly problematic and find themselves having to release people who didn't have mandatory sentences, pushing them out the back end to make room for people who are a lesser risk than the people than the people they are releasing. I would like to see that avoided in this province, in this country.
Mrs Boyd: That's what we heard from them in Florida.
One of the suggestions was that the LSI be used before sentencing so that you knew what the risk factor was ahead of time. I gather there is a part of it that could be used for a pre-sentence report, but they aren't always done, are they?
Mr Evans: No. There are not always pre-sentence reports done, so that's another problem.
Mrs Boyd: That's right, but if we're really going to upfront this system, it would seem that we'd do the risk assessment there so that we don't widen the net, which is a real concern.
Mr Evans: Yes.
Mrs Boyd: Just a last thing: You're talking about community involvement, and I couldn't agree with you more. I think the more we tuck people away and pretend they are not our problem, the harder it is for us to accept that they are going to come out of prison, that they are going to be back in the community and that we have some responsibility to give them some tie to the community when they come out. That's been a big problem with the growth in this sort of mentality that there's more crime and it's worse, and the only we can solve it is to put people away for a longer period of time. Particularly in the provincial end of the system, it seems to me it has really boomeranged on us in a way that's really quite uncomfortable, isn't it?
Mr Evans: In some respects it's probably the misfortune of our own early successes.
Mrs Boyd: Yes. The last thing I wanted to ask you: It's not just having jobs that ties people and helps to predict some of the success for some of these folks, but also having some structure in their lives, a very set schedule, because that really is a problem for a large proportion of the offender population. They've never had structure in their lives, so learning to follow structure is really quite a difficult kind of situation.
I guess I worry about the number of technical violations that I see in the statistics from BC and from Florida around whether we might not be laying up for ourselves the same problem that you talked about in the CRCs. I'm not sure how much leeway is expected. We heard the police officers saying, "We know within that three-second period that somebody isn't where they're supposed to be." It seems to me that most of us don't keep our time quite that carefully.
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Mr Evans: I think the Chairman's had that problem with committee members. The difficulty is that when you're trying to get a handle on these kinds of things, you begin to really be very specific about who you're talking about, which offender groups, who you're targeting, what types of needs and programs are required for them.
The bottom line is that overprovision of services to people who don't need them causes you problems. It would be like giving people doses of a prescription drug they didn't need. It would be harmful, and so the same kind of problem, whereas for someone who really needs it, it's not harmful; it reduces the particular problem they have, and that's the kind of thing you need.
People need to have a stake in conformity or they wander aimlessly. So whatever you can do to give people a stake in conformity, which in the normal structure is family or relationship networks, employment, which is aided by the better level of education you've got, so anything that keeps people in school who don't have good schooling -- all of those things help, which means the problem of crime reduction is not limited to the criminal justice system. It begins to broaden its base; hence the need for that broader community involvement as well as other agencies'.
Mrs Boyd: Thank you very much.
Mr Tilson: I'd like to ask another question with respect to this comment you've been dealing with in respect to the issue of overservicing, which was your third opportunity for successful offender reintegration, I think is how you describe it. Are you telling us that with the community resource centres or the halfway houses there is more likely to be overservicing?
Mr Evans: No. I'd say there's more likely to be overservicing in the total criminal justice system if it doesn't do a really good job of differentiating between who needs the service and who doesn't. So it could happen in your prison system --
Mr Tilson: It could happen in either one.
Mr Evans: It could happen in your prison system, it could happen in your probation system, it could happen in your CRCs, it can happen in the electronic monitoring system.
Mr Tilson: How are some of the other jurisdictions dealing with that?
Mr Evans: It goes back to the two approaches. If they've decided only to deal with risk control and take the short term, all they're doing is their surveillance models and not worrying about it. And you will find jurisdictions in the United States where they take that case that have growth in their populations, and if you look at their admission rates to prison, they are for mostly technical violations. In some jurisdictions, over 50% of new admissions to their prison system have to do with people who have violated -- technical violations, not new offences -- existing sanctions that are put in place. You will find this especially in jurisdictions that have put heavy user fees in, so people are being sent to prison for failure to pay.
Mr Tilson: We've heard from representatives from Florida and we've heard from representatives from British Columbia. The system we're using in Ontario is a back end system. In other words, people in the administration of jails, I suppose, decide who goes on and who doesn't go on. The issue in Florida is the front end, as I understand it. I don't know whether they've got both or not, but it seems, hearing the comments made last week or two weeks ago, it had to do with the courts ruling whether someone is to go on to electronic monitoring. I got the impression there seemed to be more problems with that, that the courts perhaps didn't have the expertise or the availability of information to determine who should go on it and who shouldn't go on it.
Are you in a position to tell us what your observations are around the United States as to which is better or which is more appropriate, the front end or the back end system?
Mr Evans: Like any program or strategy or new law, the amount of education and instruction that is given to the actors within the criminal justice system is usually woefully inadequate. Even in this province, when we introduced community service orders, it was supposed to be an alternative to incarceration. Within a very short period of time, over 12,000 people -- I don't know what the figures are today -- were serving CSOs as an addition to probation, when we never had that many beds anyway. So if those were true alternatives to incarceration, we really were in trouble, and yet if they violated, there was a greater tendency for the judge then to be really ticked off and send them to jail.
This is what I mean by, if we're not careful -- and in the front end stuff with the electronic monitoring in the United States, there is that danger. But where good pre-sentence reports are done, where time has been allotted by the probation officer who does that, looks at the individual and does a kind of assessment of them and makes the recommendation that this would be a suitable candidate for electronic monitoring, you make the problem less likely.
Where it's a wide-open game, you're into that matter I alluded to, that the purchasers of your services are not the same as your consumers. They see, "Here's a free thing. This looks good. This will satisfy the community because it looks like we're being tougher," without asking the question of whether you needed to be tougher.
Mr Tilson: I must say the general tone seemed to be that they were having problems over that, particularly with deals with the crown with respect to sentencing, and that it may be inappropriate for people to go on to electronic monitoring but because some arrangement was made for a plea or something like that --
Mr Evans: Exactly. It becomes inappropriate.
Mr Tilson: I think the comment was made -- in fact, it was made by the individual, which may get to the real crunch of the issue -- that not everyone can be incarcerated. We have a whole slew of crimes, from the very serious to the not so serious, and how far do we go in incarcerating people? You get stuck in the dilemma that, well, you know, there's a slight penalty, not to be able to go home, but on the other hand you're not coming into communication with other criminals. You're able to go out and get a job. Your family may be on social assistance, and if you can get a job, that other aspect of it isn't strained. I guess all of these things have been canvassed by different jurisdictions across North America.
I guess my final question, because I know other members of the government side have questions, is, do you feel that electronic monitoring is considered to be a success in the United States, notwithstanding some of the criticisms I've read to the committee in the past? Apparently there was a study done by the US National Institute of Corrections that said electronic monitoring is in a shambles and requires a full examination to measure its impact on crime rates. I don't even know who that is. Notwithstanding that, can you tell us what your observations are as to electronic monitoring throughout the United States?
Mr Evans: I may need to declare one of those conflicts of interest, since I've done some work with the US Department of Justice. But on the probation side of it, there's probably less than 30,000 people on electronic monitoring across the United States. If you look at their total number of people who are released, that's very small.
If I look at the state of Washington, which is mostly back end as a correctional option, they have roughly 400 people at both state and local levels, because they have a county system as well as a state system, on electronic monitoring, and they would have twice the number of people incarcerated at the prison at the state level and many more in the jail system than we do in Ontario.
So the number of people who are actually using it is relatively small, and so it's an infancy thing. It's a thing that, if you're in at a certain level, you should be able to begin to shape it appropriately. I think that in Ontario, the approach to use it at the back end, where they have some control about who gets it, is more promising till you test it out than if we had turned it loose on judges. I think in that sense that's a better strategy in terms of implementation.
They have an opportunity, if they have the money, to do reasonable research on it over a period of time and not get hung up about, "We have to show results within six months or a year," but be reasonable about good time periods for decent research, at the same time monitoring and researching the people you're able to let go on either parole or other forms of temporary absence without the electronic monitoring who have similar or approximate risk levels. Then we could find out. We might then find out we could do away with a lot of our prisons in Ontario if this was the case, which would be a remarkable saving. So there is an opportunity to do really sensible research about this program area if people want to get serious about it.
The difficulty in cost-cutting times is that people just look for a strategy they can use now, and whether it's in the business world or in government, it's the same.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Evans, for your attendance today.
This committee shall not meet tomorrow. The next meeting is on Monday, May 13, at 3:30 pm. You will all be receiving the summary of evidence and presentations to date no later than Thursday so you can review it this weekend. We only have one and a half hours to write our report on Monday, so if you could do your homework, it would be advisable.
We are adjourning till next Monday.
The committee adjourned at 1731.