:
Good afternoon, everyone.
This is meeting number 24 of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security on Tuesday, February 14, 2012.
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.
Today we are continuing our study on the use of electronic monitoring in both a corrections and a conditional release setting, as well as an immigration enforcement setting, with a view to determining effectiveness, cost efficiency, and implementation readiness.
In our first hour we will hear from the Department of National Defence. Appearing before us, as you see here today, is Mr. Anthony Ashley, director general at the Centre for Security Science, Defence Research and Development Canada. We also have Mr. Pierre Meunier, portfolio manager, surveillance, intelligence, and interdiction, Centre for Security Science, Defence Research and Development Canada.
Welcome to our committee.
I understand we have an opening statement from Mr. Ashley. We look forward to those comments, and then we will go into a round of questioning.
Mr. Ashley.
:
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, members of the committee.
My name, as you heard already, is Anthony Ashley. I am the director general of the Defence Research and Development Canada Centre for Security Science, and I have been in that position since the centre was established in 2006. As you already know, I am here with Mr. Meunier, who is my portfolio manager for surveillance, intelligence, and interdiction, which is one of the portfolios we manage through the centre.
This afternoon I would like to provide you with a brief overview of who we are and what we do, our relationship with Public Safety Canada, and the expertise we believe we can bring to bear to support the exploration of an electronic monitoring program.
The Centre for Security Science was established in 2006 through a memorandum of understanding between the Department of National Defence and Public Safety Canada. It is managed by Defence Research and Development Canada, or DRDC, as we call ourselves. DRDC is a special operating agency that's actually within the Department of National Defence, and its primary task in that context is to provide S and T support to the department and to the Canadian Forces.
The mission of the Centre for Security Science is to pull requirements and priorities from the policy and operational communities and to task the science and technology community in government, industry, academia—and also our international partners, I might add—to develop solutions that address these priorities. So we play sort of a spanning role between the operational policy communities and the real technologists and engineers out there in the community.
Among my centre staff are scientists and engineers with a wide range of relevant experience, but also those who possess expertise in areas such as capability-based planning, risk assessment, operational research, knowledge management, project management, community building, and application of scientific methodologies. We therefore believe we are well positioned to provide trusted advice to our client base.
Over the years the Centre for Security Science has built a network of experts it can draw upon to serve the needs of the public safety and security community. So, as I mentioned, ours is very much a spanning activity.
Through hundreds of projects and activities, the centre and its partners have improved Canada's capabilities, ensuring that responders, planners, and policy- and decision-makers have access to the scientific and technical knowledge, tools, processes, and advice they need to protect Canada's interests.
Last Thursday you heard testimony emphasizing the need for scientifically validated evidence to support decision-making on electronic monitoring. This is where the capabilities of the Centre for Security Science could be brought to bear to provide advice on technical requirements that would need to be met in order to meet operational requirements as defined by Correctional Service of Canada or others. I emphasize there the difference between technical requirements and operational requirements.
In relation to electronic monitoring, Defence Research and Development Canada has experts in navigation systems who intimately understand GPS technology, including such issues as jamming and operation in challenged environments. We can also draw upon expertise in data management and geographic information system-based display technology, as well as other expertise from within the Department of National Defence, for testing of these types of devices.
We also have access to a broad range of experts in other government departments, industry, and academia through our networks and communities of practice.
In conclusion, the Centre for Security Science can bring to the table the technical expertise necessary to support Public Safety Canada and Correctional Service Canada decisions surrounding the technical requirements and performance factors of electronic monitoring devices.
That is my opening statement.
Thank you very much.
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I talked a little bit about the Centre for Security Science and what our role is: to reach out to the policy and operational community, find requirements, and then reach back into the hard-core science and technology community to talk to the experts. While I may sound like an expert in GPS...I'm an electrical engineer but not really an expert in GPS.
However, we have a group of scientists and engineers at our laboratory at Shirley's Bay who are in a program we call navigation warfare. It's a program that is developed to support the Canadian Forces and their use of navigation technologies. These guys are world-renowned experts. They have written standards for NATO panels; they work very clearly with the high-end navigation problem. They're very interested in dismounted navigation or navigation in urban canyons, because a lot of activities by the Canadian Forces involve sending soldiers into confined areas more and more in cities, as opposed to into the open countryside.
We actually have access to world-class scientists and engineers who understand the intricate details of these things to the nth degree, literally, far more than I could explain.
That technology base is there to be drawn upon. We simply need to find a way, as I said, to transfer the operational requirements into technical requirements and then go and ask these guys for their opinion as to what these various technologies are capable of doing.
When we talk about biometrics, we have a biometrics program within the department that looks at biometrics in support of the Canadian Forces. I can't really talk about that in great detail. Pierre has been doing some work in biometrics with the broader public safety security community.
Maybe you can say a few words about that, Pierre.
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In our second hour today, we're hearing from three witnesses.
I'll just say that very seldom do we ever have two presentations from the same agency or from the same group, but I guess we'll allow that today. We have, from the John Howard Society of Manitoba, Mr. John Hutton, the executive director. And our committee also welcomes back Catherine Latimer, the executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada.
Appearing as an individual, we have Paul Gendreau, professor emeritus of the University of New Brunswick. Professor Gendreau is a visiting scholar from the University of North Carolina. In 2007 he was appointed as an officer of the Order of Canada, and he has published extensively on what works in the assessment and treatment of offenders and the evaluation of offender treatment programs.
I invite each of you to make an opening statement before we proceed to questions from our committee members.
Do you each have a presentation?
Perhaps I'll begin with you, Ms. Latimer, and then we'll move to Mr. Hutton and then down to Mr. Gendreau.
:
Thank you very much. It's great to be back before the committee.
As you know, the John Howard Society of Canada is a community-based charity whose mission it is to support effective, just, and humane responses to the causes and consequences of crime. The society is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
We have more than 60 front-line offices across the country, many with programs and services to support the safe reintegration of offenders into our communities and to prevent crime. Our work helps to keep communities safe and to make them safer.
The John Howard Society is pleased that the committee is studying the issue of electronic monitoring in the corrections system. This concept dates back to the 1960s. There have been an awful lot of tests to bring it forward and to use it in the corrections system. We welcome an opportunity to look at the evidence for the effectiveness of those particular initiatives.
Essentially, electronic monitoring is often brought forward to try to reduce the prison population. The need for measures to reduce prison populations in Canada is great and growing. Despite a decade or more of falling crime rates, prison crowding has been reported as a problem in many provinces and territories, and this is likely to get worse with the expected influx of new people in custody following the enactment of .
Our contention is that there are more effective, fairer, and more humane ways to reduce the prison population than by using electronic monitoring, and there are many challenges with electronic monitoring.
I will not go into a great deal of detail because I know my colleague John will be raising some specific ones. I will just mention that one of the real risks with electronic monitoring is that they widen the net, and you end up imposing the electronic monitoring on the people who would have been in the community without any kind of monitoring in any event, and not really as an alternative to custody.
They are expensive. They may not be promoting pro-social conduct. The most the monitor will tell you is where the person is, not what the person is doing. Some are limited in their availability to more affluent detainees or offenders. These are the ones for which there is a precondition that you need to have access to a land line or phone, so if you're not in a residence that has that capability, you wouldn't be eligible for that type of electronic monitoring.
They may not reduce recidivism; the studies are inconclusive about whether the electronic monitoring achieves correctional objectives. And they may replace programs that have higher success rates and are more humane. Many offenders need not just monitoring but support and human connection if they are going to overcome their challenges and safely reintegrate back into their communities.
In conclusion, prison crowding in some Canadian custody and remand facilities has exceeded levels that were found by the Supreme Court of the United Sates to violate its constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment, which are similar to the Canadian charter protections. The need to find ways to reduce the numbers in custody is great. It might be worth testing models of electronic monitoring in evaluated pilots to assess whether they reduce prison populations and overcome the known shortcomings.
However, the John Howard Society of Canada believes that there are more effective, fairer, less expensive, and more humane ways to reduce the prison population than by using electronic monitoring. We would be pleased to work with parliamentarians and others on implementing immediate solutions to the prison crowding crisis.
:
Thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to appear in front of you today.
I think I have a slightly different experience, and I hope you don't mind having both of us here. The John Howard Society of Manitoba runs two programs that monitor offenders and ex-offenders in the community, and I wanted to draw on some of that experience.
I have looked at the minutes of your last meeting and some of the reports, and you have had a lot of information about the effectiveness or the lack of effectiveness of electronic monitoring. I wanted to do something a little different today. Rather than look solely at the effectiveness of electronic monitoring, I would also like to address the benefits of human monitoring and why I would not like to see it replaced with some kind of radio or GPS device on its own.
I do have three quick concerns with regard to electronic monitoring. The first is that on its own it does not reduce recidivism or even prevent someone from committing a crime. This can be seen from the results of a pilot project undertaken in Manitoba in 2008 that was focused on youth who were considered high-risk car thieves. Upon review, it was found that while six youths successfully completed their term of supervision, seven more removed the device, another tried to cut it off but failed, and yet another stole a car while fitted with a monitor. I have sent a copy of the media release along with my statement to the clerk so you can see it for more detail. This was an example that showed that the monitors on their own did not prevent the youth from getting into more trouble or even stealing more cars.
Secondly, electronic monitoring is very expensive. I'm aware of a pilot project in Ontario launched in 2008. It cost over $850,000 to track just 46 parolees, all of whom were volunteers, suggesting that they were not at high risk to reoffend or they likely wouldn't have volunteered to wear the monitor. One parole officer could have provided human supervision for the same number of people in the community for one-tenth of the cost.
When evaluating electronic monitoring, the comparison should be not with incarceration but with the other forms of community-based monitoring.
I'm going to just skip over, I think, more to the point that the two presenters who spoke on the 9th stressed—that electronic monitoring would not be successful as a stand-alone approach, but should be combined with other kinds of programming and intervention. From my own experience at John Howard Society of Manitoba, I would take this conclusion one step further: interventions can succeed on their own without electronic monitoring at all.
The John Howard Society of Manitoba operates two programs that monitor and supervise clients. The first is a community-based alternative sentencing program, which has been evaluated quite positively by one of your other presenters, James Bonta, and which is known as the restorative resolutions program. Clients in this program have all pleaded guilty and are facing a jail sentence. They could be at low, medium, or high risk to reoffend. They could be a first-time offender or someone with a lengthy record, but in each case the client is prepared to take responsibility for his or for her actions and wants to repair the harm they have done in some way. The client works with the staff member in preparing a sentencing plan, and if approved by the court, the client carries out the plan while living in the community under the supervision of this office.
Our office supervises these individuals. They come in and meet once a week for a sit-down meeting for at least the first three months with that staff. There are phone calls, there are checks on curfews, checks on employment, and if a client is seen as failing to comply, they can be breached, and the program does breach clients if it has to.
On the other hand, we have a 90% completion rate, and the recidivism rate for this program over three years, which is quite good, is only 22%. That's half of what would happen when looking at people serving custodial sentences for similar types of crime. So there is a very low rate of recidivism—and very successful in terms of that—and we use no electronic monitoring.
Second, we just started operating a bail supervision and support program. It hasn't been evaluated, so I don't have the same kinds of statistics in terms of recidivism, but it is targeted at medium- and high-risk clients who would not otherwise be granted bail. This is funded by Manitoba Justice. Their challenge to us was that we get the guys out who would not otherwise get out and they would consider funding this program.
Something similar we do is a plan that assesses the risk factors of the individuals. If bail is granted, the individuals come into our supervision and care. They may live in a residence we have in our building. They're under our supervision and our support. Curfews and employment checks are made. Our first client has successfully completed the program, which just started in November, without reoffending. He attended his court date, as he should.
In neither of these programs do we use any kind of electronic monitoring. I would suggest that some of the strength of this program is the contact between the staff and the client. We establish some trust and a bit of a relationship, even with things as mundane as a phone call every night to verify the curfew and to make sure that the person is where he is supposed to be. We can verify where someone is, because we only phone land lines, so we know that the person is at the other end of the phone. We can also check in and see how he is doing. If somebody has a problem—maybe he's having trouble with an addiction—we can deal with it right away.
I would just let you contemplate that for many of the uses of electronic monitoring, it may be possible to monitor individuals in the community even more cheaply and more efficiently with human monitoring or those kinds of supports. If electronic monitoring is not seen as being particularly successful without those supports, then at the very least you would consider doing it together with them. But why not consider perhaps the possibility that it might be more efficient to put more resources into monitoring programs that involve reporting to a trained individual who is both supervising and supporting the individual while he is out in the community?
In conclusion, I wanted to give the example of the two programs, noting that we work with medium- and high-risk offenders. With the program that has been evaluated already, we've had a very good recidivism rate. That's where I wanted to take the presentation. What I wanted to leave with the committee this afternoon is the idea that perhaps the alternative is not electronic monitoring but is some other kind of monitoring that could be equally, if not more, effective for less money.
Unfortunately, my French is not very good. So I will speak in English.
[English]
Electronic monitoring must work because I got noticed at 11 o'clock on Friday night, when I was here briefly in Ottawa, and asked if I could appear at this committee. I'm representing myself. Hopefully my friends in North Carolina, where I live most of the time, will know exactly where I am. I don't want to go to a North Carolina prison, let me tell you, if I breach whatever thing I am under.
I have a number of points to raise. I'll try to be as brief as possible within the 10 minutes. I have provided an outline to the translators because some of the comments are fairly technical. I assume they will be translated, as the clerk has mentioned, for you to peruse later on.
First of all, I'm a researcher. I started working in corrections in 1961 and spent most of my life in Canada. I'm a Canadian citizen, and have worked extensively in the U.S. and some other countries. Part of my job is to evaluate the effectiveness of various kinds of programs. When you compare similar groups of inmates on regular probation versus those on electronic monitoring, the results indicate there are slight increases in recidivism of 1% or 2% for inmates on electronic monitoring versus those who are on regular probation. This is not an outlier result. The standard result for all forms of sanctions—boot camps, drug testing, shock incarceration, in and out of prison quickly, and more versus less prison time—all indicate that there is no effect on recidivism. The sample size we have now from our studies over the years is 500,000.
Secondly, I'm going to give you a lot of information from the U.S. perspective, which may generalize to some extent to my home country here. EM is reserved for low-risk offenders. The general estimate from people in probation, who I work with and deal with in the United States, is that it is three to five times more costly. In addition, when low-risk offenders are revoked for a technical violation—and many of these are trivial, such as you weren't here in the place you should have been, or this and that—what happens is that they are returned to prison. These low-risk offenders who were revoked for a technical violation, which is far removed from a serious or even a minor crime, go back to prison and increase the cost even more so.
Thirdly, electronic monitoring has the danger of being a school for crime, because almost all offenders on electronic monitoring are low-risk. They are sent back to prison. Who is in prison? They are mainly high-risk, serious offenders. If you hang around high-risk, serious offenders, we have data, generated in Canada, that indicates there will be more recidivism. For example, if I keep living about 20 miles from the South Carolina border and keep visiting friends there, I'm afraid I'm going to be a tea partier in the next couple of years. We'll see, but it does work that way.
Electronic monitoring is not foolproof. You get false alarms, you have dead zones, and you have tampering. This was alluded to in the previous presentation. I'll give you a couple of anecdotes of what happens. This is a recent case from when we were chatting with colleagues in the southern United States. An offender was emitting signals from his bracelet that were troubling. The police and probation officers were alerted. They go across town—this is not cheap, mind you—with their sirens blaring. The offender was in the swimming pool, dipping his ankle bracelet in the water. That caused all kinds of alarms, and that led to a crisis. You get those circumstances. They are not common, but even if you have these kinds of breakdowns 10% or 15% of the time, it is an enormous cost to the public.
Electronic monitoring doesn't tell you about the presence or absence of others in your environment, or what they are doing. That's very important to recognize. You could be in a place you shouldn't be in, but you could be with individuals who are pro-social, and you could be doing all kinds of things that are not related to any kind of criminal behaviour. Here are some subtle things that happen with electronic monitoring in our experience. Electronic monitoring produces an enormous amount of information.
I imagine some of your party whips are probably interested in electronic monitoring and applying it to you to see exactly where you might be. Please reassure them it will produce a tremendous amount of information: what grocery store you went to, whether you made a wrong turn on Bank Street, how many times you've been to the LCBO. Who knows? You might even have been talking to an opposition party member.
That sets up an enormous amount of information, and when that happens, it dramatically increases the work of probation officers.
EM, electronic monitoring, sets up a system for wilful negligence if banking hours are kept. In some jurisdictions in America, and possibly in Canada, they've had 9 to 5 electronic monitoring. Say something happens at 5:06 or 3 in the morning; then all heck breaks loose and you have to deal with that situation. Some jurisdictions that had the banking hour electronic monitoring protocol in place have had to go to 24/7 monitoring. If you're going to be monitoring people for 24 hours and you're really afraid of making a mistake when you have these kinds of programs in place, then you're going to have the costs in manpower ramped up considerably.
Here's a subtle point that no one really addresses, but I think it's important. If you put electronic monitoring into a probation service, what you do is you transform the mindset and the professionalism of probation officers. What is your main goal? To survey and monitor people to see if they may in fact be misbehaving themselves. What that means is that probation officers, who are really aware of what their job is and what they will do, will concentrate on looking for technical violations and all sorts of other violations.
It also leads to a CYA orientation to one's work. That leads to more technical violations. In one research project we conducted in New Jersey years ago, we found that probation officers who had a mindset of getting tough and cracking down had technical violations and recidivism rates of their offenders 20% to 30% higher than those who had a balanced treatment versus surveillance approach. So that's an important thing.
Another issue that is raised that you may wish to consider is electronic monitoring for high-risk offenders. I've made that argument in the past, because it seems to me if you want to put someone out in the community for treatment, but they are a high-profile offender and they're at a high risk for committing a crime, you might want to have electronic monitoring. I think that's worth trying. We have no research on that.
But here's the rub. If you're going to take that policy initiative, you put yourself at great risk, because one violation of a particularly high-risk offender who's on electronic monitoring could crash your whole system.
I just came back from New Zealand, where we were looking at correctional policy issues, and indeed that happened. It wasn't particularly an electronic monitoring case, but one serious mistake by a high-risk offender in the community almost abolished the probation department in that country.
So if you want to take that high-risk monitoring procedure in the community, then you're going to have to have tremendous political support to do so.
In the U.S.A., the organization known as ICE—an interesting acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement—sees to it that any immigration violators, people who try to get into the country several times, people who have committed serious crimes, are immediately sent to a prison. In fact, the Bureau of Prisons has many immigration cases right now.
What happens is that with families or individuals who are low risk, it seems they're the ones who get on electronic monitoring within the U.S. context.
Here's a final point, and it's controversial. It's an American argument. It has been argued by some criminologists in the U.S. that policies like electronic monitoring and a more Orwellian approach to dealing with individuals have been less about the protection of the public and more to do with economic interests. That's a general, broad perspective. It's controversial.
We have seen in the United States the building of many prisons in rural areas to spur economies. We see the privatization of corrections to be increased substantially more, particularly in the U.S. And with the Supreme Court decision that corporations now are individuals, we can see corporations making huge donations to interested political parties to support commercial interests. That is an interesting wedge that sometimes comes into the system, and that is a peculiarly American sort of situation, but it could apply to some other jurisdictions.
Thank you.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses for your attendance and for your thoughts on this important topic.
You all have concerns about this electronic monitoring. It's going to appear that I'm in favour of electronic monitoring, and that's not true, because I haven't made up my mind yet, but just so that we can have a fulsome debate on the topic, I'm going to challenge some of your commentary.
I'm going to start with your last comment, Dr. Gendreau, on economic interests. I can't think of any other philosophical reason why we would go down that road other than to save money.
You all talked about the expense of this. I made notes, and you indicated three to five times more costly.
I think, Ms. Latimer, you said more expensive, and, Mr. Hutton, you said it would be $800,000 to monitor 46 offenders. More expensive compared to what? I'm assuming you mean more expensive compared to community supervision without electronic monitoring. You can't mean versus incarceration, which in a medium security institution in Canada runs close to $100,000 and in maximum security it's well north of that.
Start in any order you like.
:
I was looking at the comments from the fellow from England. He said that where electronic monitoring had been successful, they were using it with high-risk youth. It was one of about six or seven different forms of intervention. There may be a case where it is important to know that somebody is on top of some very intensive kinds of intervention as well.
My bias is towards those interventions and towards having the resources available for the interventions. I do get the point that sometimes people who are not released into the community are the people who pose more of a risk; I think that's what you were getting at. But I'm concerned that there is a trend away from community-based sentences, and they can be quite effective, because a lot of the supports are in the community.
For example, some of the people we work with in our bail program are chronic offenders. They're in and out of custody all the time, but they're not necessarily in for murder or for robbing a bank. It's for assault, theft, robbery.... But they're in and out of custody so often that they can't access supports for an addiction. They can't get the educational upgrading or the employment training they may need in the community because they don't spend enough time there.
What we're trying to do with the bail program I mentioned earlier is to actually allow someone to return and be supported in the community while they deal with some of these issues, and do it more effectively.
In terms of programming, if you're looking at releasing someone back into the community or having someone in the community on bail, let's go beyond simply knowing where they are and just tracking them. Let's try to identify some of the issues and the challenges they do pose, and if the safety of the community can be accommodated at the same time, have the person out in the community where they have the greatest access to the fullest range of supports. That's where individuals can make some long-term changes for themselves.