MINISTRY OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL, BRITISH COLUMBIA
CONTENTS
Tuesday 23 April 1996
Electronic monitoring
Ministry of the Attorney General, British Columbia
Jim Cairns, analyst, electronic monitoring program, corrections branch
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
Clerk / Greffière: Donna Bryce
Staff / Personnel: Susan Swift, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1531 in room 5540, Whitney Block, Toronto.
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.
MINISTRY OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL, BRITISH COLUMBIA
The Chair (Mr Gerry Martiniuk): Good afternoon, Mr Cairns. We have one hour. This is an experiment for us in teleconferencing. Perhaps you're familiar with this procedure, but we are not. However, we will hopefully have your presentation, and I thank you very much on behalf of the committee for taking the time and the trouble to appear before us.
As you know, we are studying electronic monitoring devices. We understand that you have some expertise in that area. Therefore, we will let you make your presentation and then each caucus will have a question in rotation. We have one hour in total. I would ask you to proceed and tell us what you would like to tell us.
Mr Jim Cairns: Good afternoon. I really do thank you for the opportunity to address the standing committee as part of your review on the use of electronic monitoring for the supervision of offenders. I've prepared a few brief notes to use as an opening statement, but I suspect you might get more, if I can use the expression, bang for your buck if you ask questions and I respond to the things you have concerns about.
I've also faxed out a small package of information that hopefully has been distributed to you. That can be used as a base document for questions, although I believe that some of the numbers I may use today will be updates from the material that was sent out, given that we've already updated some of our figures.
I've had the opportunity to review the Hansard of your meeting from last Monday, April 15, wherein Mr McKerrell provided background into Ontario's decision to close their community resource centres and introduce electronic monitoring. One of the reasons I wanted to read that Hansard was so that I wouldn't bore you with repeating too much of the information you've already been presented with. I'll try to cut out any duplication.
Just by comparison, BC's corrections is not as large as Ontario's. Our average daily count for 1995-96 was 2,434 inmates, and that's in our combined programs. That's 501 remands and 1,933 sentenced inmates. Our average provincial sentence was slightly over 115 days with the average length of stay in custody around 62 days. Those are all the statistics I'll deal with now -- I do have other stats available to respond to your questions -- to give you a bit of a background in comparative sizes between Ontario and BC as corrections go.
Also, we do not have a community residential program on either the exact style or scale that Ontario has -- or perhaps had, I should say -- although we do have five homes that are under contract to house a total combined average population of only about 15 offenders on any given day. We also operate two community correctional centres, and these are gazetted facilities staffed by correctional officers. They have a combined total of 67 beds and they generally operate at or near capacity. In the past we had several more of what we called CBRCs, community-based residential centres, and the average count there was about three times what it is today, and we had four community correctional centres, and their total capacity was just over 100. The introduction of electronic monitoring allowed us to close those facilities.
I was also interested in reading Ms McKeague's comments regarding the Ontario experience with risk assessment, given that that's an area we have just recently entered into on a formal basis, having developed our own risk assessment tool. Like Ontario, we too have a combined needs assessment as part of our process, and this is where we attempt to identify the criminogenic factors that lead to the offender's behaviour. These are areas where we will target our program and program dollars.
In terms of what we're doing in BC, I could almost quote from Ms McKeague's comments at the end of page J-790, where she speaks about community corrections intervention, the approach that is consistent with risk/needs assessments and provides a continuum from the institution to the community. This is what we've been doing for several years now but without the added benefit of the risk/needs assessment tool, and that's how far we use our electronic monitoring program.
With regard to EMP -- that's how we refer to our electronic monitoring program -- we originally targeted low-risk, non-violent offenders. To be more specific, we actually directed the program at the typical intermittent server. I'm sure you're familiar with the intermittent server type. Basically they're the kind of offenders of whom the courts were saying these people were suitable or at least acceptable to remain in the community four or five nights a week and only needed to be locked up on a part-time basis, generally weekends. Our approach was to have the court impose a straight-time sentence and then we would put that offender on EMP.
Thus, the original criteria included that the sentence length not exceed three months -- 90 days -- if there was no history of violence and no history of sexual offences. Over time, we've expanded our use to include all provincial-length sentences by establishing a process for addressing exceptional cases. Any case not meeting the established criteria is an exceptional case and is subject to a higher level of decision-making.
Mr O'Neal provided a description of the nuts and bolts of EMP technology. There is no need for me to repeat that to you, because we use the exact same technology you're using. In fact, we use one of the same contractors; one of our contractors is the same as yours. We actually use two types of equipment, but essentially it works the same way. Perhaps different in what we do is that our staff make regular unscheduled visits to the offender's home, and by using the drive-by unit, which I believe you have, we can also check on their places of employment or where programs are taking place, like Alcoholics Anonymous or things like that, they may be going to.
Our staff are equipped with the roadside alcohol screening devices used by police. This is to assist in determining alcohol use. We also use EMP for intermittent servers, the persons who are actually serving intermittent sentences. We only monitor them on the days that the warrant of committal is active, so if they're in custody from Friday to Sunday, we only activate the supervision during those periods of time. This approach was considered impractical during our first three or four years of operations, but because we gained the experience, we found we were able to do this on a limited basis. On weekends we probably have somewhere between 15 and 20 persons serving their intermittent sentences on electronic monitoring.
We have considered the application of electronic monitoring for remandees, but we have not proceeded beyond discussions, mainly due to difficulties in the releasing options for that group. For example, temporary absences aren't available for persons on remand, so we would have to come up with some other mechanism for moving them from the institution to EMP. Similarly, with respect to youth, we've considered the option, but we haven't pursued it for a variety of reasons, and perhaps we could discuss that later if you're interested in that.
At this point -- I'm not sure all you want to hear -- rather than carry on a one-sided dialogue, you might find it more beneficial if I stopped and fielded any questions you might have, because I really want you to get what's best for you in this scenario. I can ramble on about EMP in British Columbia and not touch on any points that are of interest to you. So if you have questions, and I know you ran out of time with questions in the previous session, or seemed to be challenged for time, if I turn it over to you, I'll be able to answer what questions you have.
Bear in mind that we've had about seven years now of experience with electronic monitoring and are pretty satisfied with the program. I think the information that was sent out to you includes some of the background materials we have on electronic monitoring, so you have some of that kind of detail available to you. In any event, over to you for questions.
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Mr David Ramsay (Timiskaming): Thank you, Mr Cairns, for giving us your time here today and the benefit of your expertise. My first question today at the beginning of the rotation would be my concern that I would have here with the closure of our community resource centres, no longer having that sort of transition stage from incarceration to the community. What has been your experience putting people directly on to electronic monitoring without having the benefit of the programming that possibly was there in your community resource centres that you had seven years ago?
Mr Cairns: As I indicated, we haven't completely eliminated that particular option from our programs. We've maintained two community correctional centres and about five community-based residential centres. The CBRCs are contracted programs; the community correctional centres are actually a type of prison that we operate, although they are like a halfway house in a community.
In some of our regions, we decided to eliminate the programs and replace them with EMP. The trouble is, the type of inmates who were necessarily in the halfway houses don't necessarily qualify for EMP, so the option was not lost totally but it was lost for some inmates. That created some problems. We've managed to maintain some programs for that purpose simply because we've run into the situation where inmates who, for all intents and purposes, meet the requirements for EMP don't have a residence to go to. We are looking at some of the places where we have expanded the role of EMP by buying community beds in what would amount to a residential centre, but it was only strictly for lodging purposes. The persons go there on electronic monitoring but are under a contract bed that runs us $20 a night or something like that to provide them an alternative residence.
From my perspective, I would be somewhat reluctant to consider a wholesale removal of the halfway house or community-based residential centre to be completely replaced by EMP, because not all the persons can necessarily qualify for EMP. It's only a recent move on our part to create these contract beds for EMP people, but we have maintained the other kind of residences all along. From our experience we decided that we didn't think we could necessarily completely eliminate the halfway houses, but we've reduced them substantially.
Mr Gary L. Leadston (Kitchener-Wilmot): Mr Cairns, the figures that you've provided us, that we have this afternoon, do you have an update in terms of the dollars saved by using EMP instead of incarceration or the halfway houses?
Mr Cairns: I'm having a little bit of trouble hearing, but I think you wanted to know the difference in the dollars saved from halfway houses to EMP, or from correctional centres to EMP?
Mr Leadston: Now that you have EMP in place, how much money is the province saving by having that program versus having them incarcerated or in a halfway house?
Mr Cairns: Actually, I rarely use the word "save"; I use the words "cost avoidance." If somebody says you're saving money, somebody's going to want to see the money at the end of the day. But it's money we're not spending that really is reducing what we've gotten over budget. The difference in the dollar: Our electronic monitoring program runs us in the neighbourhood of $45 to $50 a day and our lowest level of custody, which would include the community correctional centres, would run us just over $100 a day. We're looking at a net cost reduction of $50 a day. We're currently running a population on electronic monitoring of over 350, so if we were to take those 350 people at $50 a day and put them all back into custody, quick mathematics would probably bring us to somewhere in the neighbourhood of $7 million a year or something like that.
Mrs Marion Boyd (London Centre): Thank you very much for your information. I'm curious about two things and I wonder if I could ask you two questions. The first is on the issue of remands. You said, and the statistics that you've sent us indicate, that most of the people -- virtually all -- who are on remand in your system are in secure remand. In other words, you don't show when there's a delay in trial, obviously, and that's to be expected, but you seem to say that you didn't think electronic monitoring would be suitable for most of those people. Is that because of your restrictions on people having been accused of crimes of violence or sexual assaults? Is it the nature of the crime that means remand people might not be suitable for electronic monitoring?
Mr Cairns: That would be part of it, but not the whole answer. You're quite right in that the vast majority of our remand population is in secure custody, although we're doing some things to change that by moving them to what we call medium security. In fact, we're even looking at one of our community correctional centres, given its remote location, as a possible holding centre for some remanded inmates -- obviously the non-violent, low-escape-risk type of remanded inmate.
The situation with electronic monitoring is that we use it here for sentenced offenders, and it's a classification option. The person is given a custodial sentence and then placed on EMP, and we use a temporary absence permit as the legal vehicle to remove him from custody to the program. Our interpretation on the law is that you cannot use a temporary absence permit in the same way to release a remanded offender to a program like electronic monitoring.
One of the things we've considered in our meetings with our crown counsel has been: Can the judge direct persons on to electronic monitoring as a supervision condition for their remanded status? Perhaps by comparison, our remand population is not terribly large. It's 500 of 2,500, so it's 20% of our population. Part of this is that we have a very active bail supervision program. These are persons who probably in the past would have been remanded -- not all of them, of course, because our bail supervision program probably has 7,000 or 8,000 people on it -- but who report to a community office, a probation office basically, so their bail is supervised by a probation officer.
Unfortunately, it creates a real bipolar effect for our remanded population. Either they're out on the streets on bail supervision or they're in secure custody. We've been trying to find a happy medium. I think we look at that now with some population in medium custody and some in open custody. A lot of them are people we know, and the day they get sentenced, we classify them to open custody or we may classify them to electronic monitoring.
To shorten the answer, our real concern is more about the legal vehicle and how to put them on the program than it has been about the type of person. We know there are types of persons out there who would qualify, but we're not quite sure how to do it legally.
Mrs Boyd: It really leads very much into my second question, because at federal-provincial-territorial meetings we've talked about ways in which the Criminal Code might better allow a more effective use of electronic monitoring.
A situation arose in British Columbia last October where a person who was under certain conditions as the result of a sentence on wife assault, as I recall, killed his partner. I remember your minister, very new at that time, talking about ways in which, when there are conditions on sentencing that people remain apart from people or a civil restraining order where people remain apart from someone, the use of electronic monitoring might be a way of enforcing that.
I'm curious as to whether there was any more talk of that after the heat of the moment and whether there has been any discussion about ways in which some of those protections could be implemented. We heard last week from the ministry that they were looking at the technology that enabled a signal to be sent if someone came within a certain distance of a place where they shouldn't be, and that sort of thing. I'm curious as to whether you see that as a next step in terms of the technology.
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Mr Cairns: That's an interesting question, because it did cause us a great deal of work to do around looking at that aspect of it. Some of the technology providers claim that their equipment does that. Frankly, from my experiences, the type of equipment we have is similar to what you have, if not exactly the same, and I don't think the equipment would provide the kind of safety net that is being sought after. The last thing I'd want to do is give a victim of spousal assault a false sense of security by saying, "We're going to put this little device in your house, your ex-spouse is going to wear this device on his ankle and as soon as he comes within range, you're going to hear a signal."
First off, the range isn't that far in terms of distance, so how much head time are you going to have? If the range is, say, 1,500 metres, that's not very much range or much time if the person is driving a vehicle. It's more likely, because of obstructions and various things like this, to be about 200 metres. What is the person is going to do if it gives a signal? Are they going to run out of the house or are they going to phone the police? How close do the police have to be in order to be there? What if the offender removed the bracelet outside the range of a receiver where no signal is picked up to say the thing has been removed? We've looked at other things. What if they've wrapped their ankle in tinfoil, for example, so no signal was going out and walked right up to the door?
I would be very reluctant to use it for those purposes until I was convinced that the technology would provide the security that we're telling these people they're going to have. If I were a victim and I had this thing on, I would probably be more terrified. What happens when you're away from the house, when you're away from the receiver? What if it picks up false signals and you're in a shopping mall and the thing beeps? What are you going to do at that point? I like the concept, but I don't think the technology is currently there that would satisfy me that it would do any good for the victims.
Mrs Boyd: I'm glad to hear you say that. I thought that expectations were being raised far too high for the kind of technology that is there. The issue is, just being warned that someone is in the vicinity doesn't give you the kind of protection you need. I'm glad that's been the decision in British Columbia. I hadn't heard any more about it after I came home in October. I'm glad you've looked into it. It is something we need to be aware of. That business of wrapping the ankle in tin foil I assume doesn't interfere with the program that you have, because no signal is the signal to corrections that there's a problem. I gather that's the issue.
Mr Cairns: Yes. You've done your homework. You're quite right.
Mr Ramsay: Mr Cairns, you had mentioned that in BC you have regular, unscheduled visits. Could you tell us why you've instituted that program, the additional cost for the program and the results of that? What are you validating? What are you finding?
Mr Cairns: It's interesting, because I suspect that has probably been the key or one of the keys to the success of our program. We decided that we weren't prepared. When we instituted this program we looked at a number of American jurisdictions that were doing this. You can imagine seven years or so ago when we looked at this it was still pretty neophyte-type stuff happening even in the United States. We weren't satisfied with the concept of just putting on the bracelet and letting a computer monitor this person. Part of it was that there's a human interactive aspect of a person being in custody, and we didn't want to lose that completely with a person being left at home and somewhat isolated, so we introduced the concept of intensive supervision. That's probably what our program is best described as, intensive supervision enhanced by the use of technology. While we call it electronic monitoring, it's only one component of what we do.
Our officers, as I've indicated, make regularly unscheduled visits so the offender doesn't fall into a pattern of knowing that the officer is going to come every Tuesday afternoon at 4 o'clock. The officer can come at any time. Our officers work 16 hours a day, seven days a week. We have developed a schedule -- it's not in the policies that you have; it's in the redrafted stuff that I just finished doing -- that is basically a matrix. The matrix, and there's no point in my holding it up in front of you, because I don't think you would see it, says across the top, "Low Needs, Medium Needs, High Needs," and down the side it says, "Low Risk, Medium Risk, High Risk."
You create a matrix like that, and it develops a cycle of reporting schedules. It will say for example that a low-needs, low-risk person is on a two-times cycle, so they'd be visited at least twice by an officer in an eight-day period; through to the opposite end, which is a high-risk, high-needs person, which would have a four-times cycle, who would be seen a minimum of four times in person during that period of time. As the person is longer on the program, we can reduce some of the in-person contacts to something like a telephone contact or a drive-by contact, where we would just drive by their, say, place of meeting and find out if they're there.
The purposes of doing this, as I've indicated, are (1) the human interaction to go there -- making sure how the person is doing, just checking with him to see if we can provide any counselling, any assistance, any referrals to assistance programs, that type of thing; (2) to check on the equipment to make sure that it is still functioning and operating and has not been manipulated in any way, sense or form that hasn't been picked up. It gives us the opportunity to check things like alcohol consumption or drug use, the type of activity that might be going on in the house. We've found that the vast majority of our suspensions from the program are a result of the intervention of the staff attending and finding the person having consumed alcohol or drugs of some kind.
It's also a safety net for persons, particularly if we have females on the program who may be subject to domestic abuse and they're afraid to report that, because what's the result? The result may be that they end up back in custody if they come off the program. But it reinforces the fact that we are going to be around there, and the officer comes in and checks just to make sure that everything in the home is copacetic and that there are no problems developing. Like I said, it's been one of the key parts of our program.
The other key part is that we screen everybody who goes on the program. The screening is made by the same officers who go out and check the people in the community. There's a vested interest in them to screen these people properly because they don't want to walk into a situation where they're going to run into difficulties in making these home visits. It's been an integral part of our program and definitely adds to the cost of the program.
If we were to simply screen people, put the equipment on them and send or deliver them home with the equipment, we could probably reduce our costs by half, but we would also reduce our effectiveness by more than half, I suspect, therefore the end result might be more people in custody. Therefore, the sawoff would be that we wouldn't gain the amount of money we would apparently save on the surface because we wouldn't have as many people on the program, and they wouldn't succeed as well either.
Mr Ramsay: Just to sum up, then, you believe that for an electronic monitoring program to be successful, it's really necessary to have the component of unscheduled visits.
Mr Cairns: We would stand by that. In our opinion, yes, we would. I'm aware of some American programs that have a person who sits on a computer with 1,200 people out in the community, so your cost is about $4 a day. They're only reporting violations. Frankly, if you're going to do that, why bother with the $4 to put the piece of equipment on? All it does is provide some curfew. If we want to satisfy the people of British Columbia that the persons are serving a sentence and are being monitored, I think that's how we've managed to sell the program, and it has been very credibly done.
Mr Ron Johnson (Brantford): I have a couple of questions, actually. Mr Cairns, initially you indicated that the program started in British Columbia for those who were convicted with 90-day sentences and less, non-violent, non-sex offences, and then you expanded the program to include what I would assume were most provincial offences.
Mr Cairns: That's right.
Mr Ron Johnson: When you did that, when you went through that expansion, what kinds of troubles, if any, did you experience and changes in the way you offered the program? How did you cope with that?
Mr Cairns: We didn't really encounter very many difficulties at all. Part of it was, it just evolved as we were going along, we found that with 90-day sentences -- and we were having a lot of success with those and we wanted to get the numbers up. We thought, what if we went to a 120-day sentence. So the progression was very small. We went, like I say, from a three-month sentence to a four-month sentence.
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We looked at cases where the person had an assault in their background but the assault was five years ago and we thought, maybe that doesn't impact very much on where they're at today. We thought maybe we can introduce people who have had a minor history of assault cases or the sexual offence was a historical offence, the offence was 15 or 20 years old, that why should it impact on what we're doing today. So we eased ourselves into those kind of situations and as we became more comfortable with that type of population, we merely expanded with each kind of progression. We just didn't decide that we're going to go to six months today and then introduce a six-month program.
The first thing we did was, we provided what we call the exceptional cases, and the exceptional cases were those persons who primarily met all the criteria except for one or two, and we just gave them a higher degree of scrutiny. For example, if the director of the institution was the person who was going to be the decision-maker for the average, run-of-the-mill, standard, regulation-issue EMP case, we would make the district director or the regional director the person responsible for the next level of case. They would review it at a slightly higher level and put those people on.
Then when we came to the point where we became more comfortable with those kind of decisions, we dropped the regional director to a district director in terms of decision-making and we've recently gone now to local directors of centres making the decision on routine cases. It's just been a progression. Once we got past the six-month barrier, we decided, why can't we look at any case and apply the criteria and make a decision based on individual merits rather than on policy. So right now, our current practice is, anybody serving a sentence of six months or less is automatically referred to the electronic monitoring program, regardless of the offence, and the electronic monitoring people make the decision whether they want to take that person or not.
We've got three categories of automatic referral, actually. The first is six months or less. If the person has a court-endorsed order, so the judge has said, "I think this person should be in electronic monitoring," regardless of their offence, we will look at that person. If the person is given a risk assessment in the institution and it comes up low-risk on the institutional assessment, they will also be automatically referred to electronic monitoring. We leave it to the electronic monitoring people to make the decision whether they're going to accept the person on the program or not.
Mr Ron Johnson: Would it be your recommendation that we here go through that same learning curve, that same learning process, or would it be your recommendation that we could adapt the same position you're in now and start with a six-month criterion?
Mr Cairns: I'd be pretty comfortable in saying that you could go to a six-month criterion, although part of ours was acceptance by correctional staff, acceptance by politicians, acceptance by the general public, acceptance by the judicial system, the judges and crowns, this sort of thing. So we'd have the benefit of that period of time to allow that credibility and acceptance to be established. I don't know if we would have had the same degree of success introducing the program as we have it today if we had introduced it seven years ago. We may not have been able to have the program viewed as credibly.
We had a lot of media attention, and a lot of it wasn't positive. There was a lot of negative attention to the concept of electronic monitoring, and from both sides: one that it was too soft; one that it was too harsh -- how can you turn a home into a prison, the sort of civil libertarian approach, as opposed to the fact that these guys have just been given a jail sentence, now you're sending them home, how can you get away with doing this?
It's routine now. It's a very acceptable program in British Columbia and I think part of it is that we didn't rush into the program. We took our time, we were conservative in our initial approach. I think because we were successful in that, we were able to expand. I can't suggest to you that you can run out and institute the program exactly as we have it today. I would like to think you could do that, but I'm not quite sure you could do that. I think our experience here will benefit you in Ontario in terms of the fact that if your people there will accept the fact that the program in British Columbia is good for us, then it might be good for you, and you may not have to have as slow growing pains as we have.
I guess I'm a small-c conservative in terms of introducing that kind of a program. I think you have to let it build its own degree of credibility. I'm a bit cautious about you just jumping in and taking our program and cloning it. I'm not sure if it would work.
Mr Ron Johnson: I just have one more quick question, Mr Cairns. You indicated that the unscheduled visits were a very important part of the program in British Columbia. With respect to those, do you have or have you considered non-profit agencies such as the St Leonard's Society doing some of that for you on a contract basis, or is this something that you're doing directly from your ministry?
Mr Cairns: We do it directly from the ministry. It's correctional staff who do that, although in some of our remote areas we've been using contract personnel. In fact, we have a protocol with the RCMP, who provide some of that supervision in areas where we don't have correctional staff. In British Columbia, like all of Canada and certainly Ontario, there are great pockets of small populations and large areas where there's very little population, and we can't service that from a correctional centre. We really operate our electronic monitoring program relatively in conjunction with, in proximity to, our correctional centres. We have gone out and we do have community-based offices attached to probation offices. We have an electronic monitor officer working out of our probation offices in some of our locations. We're using native police or native case workers or native counsellors in some of the remote Indian reservations to provide the supervision in there.
We haven't considered, other than that type of approach, private agencies like John Howard or E. Fry at this point. Part of that is the debate around privatization issues within British Columbia. The Ministry of the Attorney General, corrections branch, made a commitment some time ago that we would not privatize those programs where we believe that the function needs to be carried out by a peace officer, as described in the Criminal Code. Because these people are in custody and are subject to a temporary absence permit and subject to possible apprehension at the time and our people have the authority to suspend the TA and apprehend, for that purpose we have said that's a peace officer's function and we haven't privatized peace officer functions. It may be skirting around, but it's a bit of a political issue and a bit of a sensitive issue here with our labour relations as well.
Mrs Boyd: I can assure you it's a sensitive issue here as well. In view of what you've said about the unscheduled visits, when you gave the cost estimates before, it sounded to me as though you were not adding in those costs or the costs of the counselling, because I notice in your paper here that you talk about offering counselling services. I assume drug and alcohol counselling would be a major part of that but not all of it. I assume there would be certainly in some areas some anger control management and that sort of thing, perhaps even psychotherapy. So I assume that may be part of the program.
When you gave us the figures before, were you estimating into the cost for someone under electronic management simply the cost of the equipment and the actual surveillance, or were you adding in the cost of these unscheduled visits and the counselling that you obviously think are an important part of this?
Mr Cairns: The visits aspect is included in that, because the costs that we talk about are our staffing costs, and that's one of the reasons why the staffing costs are the way they are, because of the visits. So our costs would include the contract for the equipment and the staff to run the program and the vehicles they use and the cellular phones and the radios etc, that sort of thing.
It will include, in some places, some of the programming costs but not necessarily all of them, because we will access programs that are already there in the community, so they're not an add-on cost to the program. We've been looking at, in our major region, the Fraser region, which has probably our largest EMP -- if we've got 300, they'll have 100 on, so roughly a third of the offenders are in that area. They've been doing some cognitive skills things under contract with persons on EMP going to that program. That would not necessarily be costed out in the operations costs, but they would have to account for that in their budgetary process somewhere, and presumably that will be factored into EMP.
They might be able to get away with it because of the high volume of people they have on EMP. In the northern region where we only have, say, 45 people on EMP, it's much more difficult for them to maintain the cost of $50 a day or under that, where the Fraser region, if you've got 100 or 125 people on EMP, your per diem costs might start dropping to the $35 range. Therefore, they've got a little bit more leeway with respect to program dollars. But primarily our costs have not included very much in the way of program dollars. We've been trying to get programs that already exist.
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Mrs Boyd: The twin question to that is, do you find it difficult to have people who are on the electronic monitoring accepted into community-based programs for all of these various things and do you have difficulty with employers accepting electronically monitored people into employment? Because obviously one of the issues is to reduce the economic effects on the family, and I know there may be some reluctance at first, but that may be part of what you were talking about, about winning the public over to seeing this as an appropriate program.
Mr Cairns: That's not been an issue for us with respect to jobs or programs. We don't take the responsibility to find jobs for inmates; that's their issue. A lot of them of course have jobs or access to potential jobs before we put them on the program. One of the things we check out is the fact that the job does exist and the people are willing to take them.
We make it one of our criteria that the offender inform the employer that they are on this program, and there may be a circumstance where it's not, but we don't want to get in a situation where, for example, a person is in on a case of theft from an employer and we put them out on electronic monitoring and they go to work for a different employer of the same sort -- for example, a shoe store -- and they create a theft from the shoe store while they're on the program. The credibility would go down the sewer pretty quickly in that kind of situation.
We make it very clear to the offender that they have to inform the employer that they are on electronic monitoring. We don't do it for them, we don't threaten to do it, but we want to make sure they do that because we need to confirm with the employer that this person can work for them. We try not to make any of the checks at the place of employment, although we may from time to time do that. We've not found that a problem. In fact, we have had employers come to us and say, "If you are releasing people on to EMP, I have a job site that I would be prepared to take people to work on."
It's worked really well because of the flexibility of the program and the fact that if this guy had a drinking problem before, he's not going to have a drinking problem when he's on EMP. If he had a tardiness problem, he's not going to have a tardiness problem now because we monitor his behaviour. You leave the house at a certain time; you return at a certain time, various things like that. I think we're probably turning out for the employer a better employee while they're on the program. So I think that has worked in our benefit. It's probably not something we consciously did; it's just been a result.
In terms of program, we've never had a problem with going to AA meetings or psychotherapy or anger management or anything like that. That has not been an issue. In fact, we're looking at incorporating more programs that will involve even persons in custody in the community, or even bring community people into the custody centre to do some of this programming, or people on EMP plus a community going to an open custody centre for programming so we can perhaps with contract dollars get more units per dollar without having to chase around to get them. So those are other things we're looking at.
Mr Ramsay: Mr Cairns, in your presentation you had stated that you had made a conscious decision not to extend the program to youth. Could you give us the thinking behind that?
Mr Cairns: Yes. We've looked at it a number of times. Part of the situation is, again we look at it as a custodial program and there are only about 300 or 350 youth in custody in British Columbia. So the number is small. If we use the same ratio of roughly 15% of the sentenced population that we have in the adult side, and then if we're taking 15% of less than 300, the numbers would be pretty small kind of numbers and one would have to justify whether it warranted it.
The other thing is, we've run a number of other programs for youth here, residential attendance programs and alternative-type programs like that, including intensive supervision using community-based individuals, probation officers or contractors, and if we can successfully maintain that group without the added cost of electronic monitoring, we don't see the point of adding the cost for that group.
The other thing is that we've also sort of assessed the fact that youths tend to be more impulsive and more spontaneous and less likely to follow the rules and regulations, and they're pretty stringent rules and regulations that we place on electronic monitoring. We haven't seen a real economic benefit to using it, or even a concept benefit. We also looked at some of the American jurisdictions that have tried it, and they haven't been terribly successful in their experiments with young offenders.
We've stayed away from it except on rare occasions. We have used it on one or two occasions for very specific purposes. An example: We used it on a female young offender who between the time of her offence and the time of sentencing gave birth to a child and was nursing this young child. We have no component in our youth system to allow a young mother to bring her child with her into the youth custody centre, as we do in the adult system. This person was not of the age where we could put her in the adult system. We came up with a community-based home for her and put her on electronic monitoring because of the seriousness of the offence, which was arson of large-volume dollars that just couldn't warrant putting her on a probation order, so in that case we made an exception.
In the same way, we made an exception on one or two remandees, and these were serious offences with medical conditions that needed to be moved into a hospital situation. To avoid the cost of 24-hour-a-day guard services, we put them on electronic monitoring while they were there, using an emergency medical temporary absence permit for those cases.
We've tended to be a bit flexible where flexibility cannot be seen as the cutting edge of the wedge and setting precedents.
Mr Ramsay: I have another question. Last week in our committee hearings we were given a demonstration of an advance in this technology where we could remotely sense alcohol on the breath. Are you considering the application of this more advanced technology in your programming?
Mr Cairns: "Considering," I guess, is the word, but it's not a strong consideration. We are currently in the process of putting out a new request for proposal for our contract and in that request for proposal we are adding, not necessarily as part of the major components but as sort of an add-on, "Would you let us know what you've got in the way of this type of technology?"
We've talked about alcohol screening. We've talked about -- I think it's GPS, or global proximity sensing; we can tell where the person is at any given moment. We're not sure if we want to go quite that far, but there may be reasons we would want to do that. That might be the type of technology we might apply to persons on peace bonds, bail bonds. Ms Boyd had asked questions in that regard. That would be something we might consider, that application under those circumstances, because you get far more advanced warning that the offender is getting close to the victim because of the GPS sensitivity.
We're also looking at standalone units. We already have some of those where they operate without hard-line phone wires, like cell phones. We've also got things called data storage units where they're outside a cell area, so the unit just stores up the information and we have to go and retrieve it. You only find out after the fact, but you get all the information. It's like a watchdog situation.
Then on whatever they've got in the way of upgrades or new stuff, we're asking them to tell us what they've got that we'd be interested in.
Voice recognition is something else we experimented with, which is an interesting concept. I went on the program myself for a weekend to test it and I was quite annoyed with it by the time the weekend was over. It's far more intrusive than the type of passive equipment we use, but it was relatively effective in knowing whether I was there or not. I found it bothersome and I didn't even stay home to pay attention to it. We're looking at that too.
We might look at that for intermittents, for example. Rather than spend the money on equipment, we would just send them home, tell them they're going to stay home for the weekend and then do it by voice-activated messages where it's voice-printing and it confirms their being there.
Those are all technology things we're looking at, but we haven't really made any commitment that we will go that direction other than to look at them.
1620
Mr David Tilson (Dufferin-Peel): Mr Cairns, you mentioned throughout that you looked at the outset -- I think your program was in existence for seven years and I think prior to that --
Mr Cairns: Yes. We started it as our pilot in 1988, and then we made it a final actual program in August 1989, I believe.
Mr Tilson: You indicated that you looked at some of the American jurisdictions and I think even now you're continuing to look at some of the American jurisdictions and what's going on there. There has been, as I understand it, some resistance in some of the United States, indicating that electronic monitoring actually increases prison populations and indeed may lead to increased crime.
Examples that have been given from a recent United States National Institute of Corrections study concluded, "Electronic monitoring is a shambles and requires a thorough examination to measure its impact on crime rates." The American Bar Association indicated there have been a number of lawsuits instituted involving the failure of electronic monitoring to provide public safety, and that these cases were working their way through the system.
Seven years may not be long enough to experience some of those things, but have you seen any signs of those types of criticisms existing in British Columbia?
Mr Cairns: Thankfully, no. I'm not familiar with that study. It would be an interesting one to read. The last point, the lawsuit aspect on the failure to provide public protection, I've never seen any incident of that happening here. There have been, from time to time, persons critical of the program, but I guess we've been rather fortunate: We've had very few people on the program actually arrested or convicted of crimes while they were on the program.
That's not to say it hasn't happened, and we were criticized in one case specifically where the person was dealing drugs out of their home. It was an intermittent server, which is interesting because the person was only monitored on weekends and there was no indication they were actually dealing their drugs only on weekends; they were dealing at other times as well. We were criticized a bit on that case by the local police.
In terms of rise in counts, we certainly experienced a rise in counts but I would say it has probably been no reflection of the electronic monitoring. It's been one of the original concerns. In terms of the history you may have read Steve Mainprize's paper, or some of his work that he's done. He's a PhD in British Columbia who did his doctoral thesis on the sort of net-widening effect of electronic monitoring and was involved in doing that at the time we were establishing our program. He was sort of taking the position of the expansion of social control and how widening the net would create more problems.
Probably that has not proved to be the case -- at least our experience would say that -- and Steve would probably change his position with respect to that issue now in looking at it. In fact, we talk from time to time because he teaches criminology in one of the junior colleges in British Columbia and stays abreast of what's happening in electronic monitoring.
There's no indication to me that it's done that, although there's a possibility that a judge might give a person a jail sentence knowing they're going to get EMP rather than give the person probation. It's a bit of a risky thing to do in view of the fact we don't make any guarantees the person will get electronic monitoring, so I can't imagine a defence counsel seeking that kind of an option. The impact probably has not been -- if there is an impact it would be fairly low.
In terms of the increase in crime, we're actually showing a decrease in crime in BC, and in fact across Canada in most areas. I wouldn't attribute that to electronic monitoring, but just say that if there's a decrease, electronic monitoring hasn't had any impact on increase in crime. That's a harder one to identify.
Mr Tilson: My question actually is a clarification of a question Mr Ramsay asked, and that was the issue of the mix with respect to halfway houses and electronic monitoring. Are the halfway houses that exist now in British Columbia the same type of halfway houses that existed prior to electronic monitoring coming into being?
Mr Cairns: Some of the homes that existed before are exactly the same. The resources are exactly the same ones. They're the same contractors, same buildings. They're scaled down in terms of the numbers. As I indicated, we only have about 15 people on any given day in our community-based resources.
The two community correctional centres were there prior to. We closed four of those, and those are our correctional centres that are like halfway houses. Those two now have been replaced with new buildings, but it's the same staff, the same concept. Nothing has changed there. The client base may have changed a little bit. They're probably a little harder-core client than what they have taken before because of EMP. It's more an adjustment than anything else.
We've had changes in types of inmates. We've had a real increase, and I suspect you have too in your jurisdiction, in domestic violence cases, so one of our community correctional centres is almost completely populated with domestic violence cases, which is something that wouldn't have happened when the program started.
We've had an increase in sex offenders over the years. I think it's an issue of public awareness and higher efforts by the police and crown to prosecute those types of cases, public awareness on those issues. Two of our open custody centres are almost totally dedicated to sex offenders, where in the past a sex offender would have been in secure custody.
We have changes going on within our populations and the way we deal with them, but in terms of the halfway houses some of the same ones are there; they're just not on the same scale.
Mrs Boyd: In your system, is it voluntary for these people to go on to electronic monitoring? As a supplemental to that, do you use your risk assessment and pre-sentence reports as a way of advising the sentencing judge or justice of the likelihood of the person being eligible for electronic monitoring?
Mr Cairns: On the voluntary aspect, technically, yes, they volunteer. I'm trying to work our guys more to downplaying the voluntary aspect of it, at least by not putting it up front and going to the inmate, "Do you want to go on EMP?" I would go through the whole process and say, "You're going on EMP," and if the inmate says, "No, I don't want to," then he would volunteer not to go on rather than -- because we don't ask them about any other kinds of programs, in a sense.
With respect to pre-sentence reports, if the probation officer does a pre-sentence report, they can recommend EMP as part of their pre-sentence report. We also do something we call an EMR, which is an electronic monitoring report, which is a report for court strictly for the purposes of assessing electronic monitoring. We don't do our risk assessment pre-court, so the risk assessment would not be part of the information that goes before the court. Risk assessment is done after sentencing.
Mr Ramsay: I'd just like to thank Mr Cairns on behalf of the members here. This has been very informative for us. It looks like your program is progressing very well there and we wish you all the best in the future.
Mr Cairns: Thank you. I wish you luck with yours too.
The Chair: On behalf of the committee, Mr Cairns, thank you for taking the trouble. It's been most valuable indeed.
Mr Cairns: My pleasure, and if I can be of any help, let me know.
The committee adjourned at 1628.