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Results: 46 - 60 of 488
Jeff Wilkins
View Jeff Wilkins Profile
Jeff Wilkins
2021-06-21 15:53
In the SIU, we know that there is still the reality that the mixture between inmates can't happen. They can't belong in the general population and there are reasons that they can't associate with one another. There's a lot of analysis done to make sure that inmates who are recreating with one another can do so. The operational reality is that it's hard to make the movement and the types of routines that are needed in the SIU—and I say “needed”—happen in the run of a day.
Back in November, we did a survey of our membership to find exactly what the problems were. Staffing was an issue. We needed more staffing. Infrastructure was an issue. In order to make the recreation happen between different populations, for example, we needed different yards, more yards.
The operational reality in terms of COVID has been that things have slowed down quite substantially, as they have across Canada. For example, it's very difficult to have meaningful contact with chaplains who aren't coming into the institution.
View Darren Fisher Profile
Lib. (NS)
I want to talk about the training correctional officers receive. There's a presumption there's lots of training. Is there uptraining, retraining, modernized training on a regular basis?
Maybe you could tell me a bit about that. I had a conversation one time with a paramedic. He said, “I get retrained all the time on this, this and this, but I've never had retraining on mental health, for instance, in 20 years as a paramedic.”
Could you talk about modernizing training, uptraining, retraining and things like that?
Jeff Wilkins
View Jeff Wilkins Profile
Jeff Wilkins
2021-06-21 15:55
Absolutely. One of the biggest initiatives we saw over the past few years was the road to mental readiness training that came out. It was mandatory training for all staff at CSC. It is more of a preparedness for mental health and for recognizing the importance of mental health among staff and inmates.
Coming out of COVID-19, the biggest plague that is going to impact many departments, but CSC in particular, is mental health. To be honest, so many more resources need to be dedicated for the mental health of not only the inmate population but of the staff members who are working there. What we've seen over the course of 15 or 16 months has just been unprecedented. Our members are burnt. They need recognition and they need help.
The more resources we could dedicate to training.... Really, there is no ongoing yearly training for mental health. It was that road to mental readiness. We do receive suicide prevention training, which is not exactly the in-depth analysis we need to make when it comes to mental health. Certainly more can be done in that area.
View Kristina Michaud Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First, I'd like to thank the witnesses for being here. I am very grateful to them.
I missed your opening remarks. Unfortunately, I had to be somewhere else. I'm sure they were very interesting. I'm going to continue with some questions anyway. Actually, I'm going to continue in the same vein as my colleague Mr. Fisher, with respect to the unions. I will address Mr. Wilkins first.
I'd like to know what challenges your union members have faced since the pandemic began. You mentioned staffing, infrastructure and space issues. Are those challenges still ongoing?
In what ways has Correctional Service Canada supported you? Have your requests been heard?
Jeff Wilkins
View Jeff Wilkins Profile
Jeff Wilkins
2021-06-21 15:58
One of the biggest things that has happened during the course of this pandemic has been staffing crises.
We've had many outbreaks across the country. As I said in my opening comments, to date around 450 of our members have contracted COVID-19 in the course of this pandemic. We have a membership of only around 6,500 to 6,800 who report to work, so that represents a huge percentage. For the most part, because we are going in to the workplace every single day, and have been, the infection has been as a result of work.
With contact tracing, trying to keep the virus at bay, keeping it out of the institution, and keeping people at home who may be been exposed to the virus, our staffing in some cases has been reduced by up to 70%. When that happens, of course, we're now talking about people being forced to stay in the workplace after their shifts are over.
Forced overtime last summer was a reality across the country. It got to the point where our members, in order to take some needed time off, were afraid to take a day off, because they didn't want somebody else to be stuck in the workplace.
It's just a constant cycle of a downward spiral when it comes to physical and mental health. That has been a huge reality. There's the genuine fear of going in to the workplace, knowing that COVID-19 is there and thinking about the possibility of bringing it home to the family. Members have been hospitalized because of COVID-19. Members have gone home from the workplace and infected their families.
On several occasions we had public health measures specifically dictated for our membership: You are to go to work; you're not to stop for gas on your way home from your shift; you're not to stop at the grocery store; when you get home, you need to isolate away from your family so that you can report to work the next day. These types of things have led to, I would say, the biggest morale problem that we've ever seen in the CSC.
I know you missed my opening comments, so I will say again that there has been no recognition of the sacrifices—and I will use the term “heroes”—made by our members during the course of this pandemic.
View Kristina Michaud Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you.
Actually, I'm wondering if your members felt safe going to work, although they may have been short-staffed.
Is that one of the reasons they asked for a bonus recognizing them as essential workers? What happened with that request, was it heard?
Jeff Wilkins
View Jeff Wilkins Profile
Jeff Wilkins
2021-06-21 16:01
We received a preliminary answer through the National Joint Council just last Tuesday that the government has done an extensive analysis on hazard pay for federal public servants. The answer is that, no, it will not be provided, which is incomprehensible to me. The provinces are being subsidized to have that recognition. Colleagues in corrections in the provinces are receiving these types of allowances.
What is really astounding is that if a staffing crisis developed to the point that we didn't have correctional officers to report to the workplace, the MOU or the contingency would be to call the military in to do our jobs. The military would come in to do our jobs. When the military went into the long-term care facilities to staff them, they received an allowance, so the ironic thing is that if the military came in to our jobs, they would receive an allowance for the jobs that we do not receive an allowance for.
View Matthew Green Profile
NDP (ON)
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the opportunity to sub in today on this very important topic, particularly as it relates to recent reports on the use of solitary confinement.
I'll share with this committee—this being my first time here—my very personal connections to this topic. I think everybody would likely know somebody who, at some point in time, has been incarcerated. I myself know many people, some of whom are families, who have been incarcerated and subjected to what I would call the cruel and unusual punishment of solitary confinement.
I would like to begin by asking about the ways in which biased risk assessments are used in prison, and perhaps I'll have Ms. Sprott share ways in which they might disproportionately affect Black and indigenous inmates.
Jane Sprott
View Jane Sprott Profile
Jane Sprott
2021-06-21 16:04
With respect to the biased risk assessments, there might be someone on this panel who is better able to talk about them than I am.
What we were looking at in the function of the SIUs was whether or not the Correctional Service of Canada was implementing the legislation. We found that overall, 38% of stays were qualifying, by the Mandela rules, as solitary confinement or torture.
That was the starting point to try to understand why that was happening. We never received a response from the Correctional Service of Canada. Maybe they already knew about it, so they didn't think it was worthy of a response.
With regard to the biased risk assessments, I think there are a fair number of court challenges and findings around those assessments with regard to security classifications. I think that is quite well known, but others on the panel could probably talk about that issue more generally than I could.
Anthony Doob
View Anthony Doob Profile
Anthony Doob
2021-06-21 16:05
I think what you might want to consider is that Black prisoners are overrepresented in the SIUs, so they're overrepresented in the Correctional Service of Canada to begin with. About 30% of prisoners in CSC facilities are Black, and close to 40% are going into the SIUs.
Going back to the risk assessment issue, the problem is that what we know about risk assessment is that the validity of the risk assessment seems to vary with the group. We know quite well that the risk assessment tools that are used by CSC do not work well for women and do not work well for indigenous people. I have less information about whether they work as well or as badly for Blacks as they do for others, but I think it's fair to say that in this sense what we don't know is very important.
As Professor Sprott just pointed out, the difficulty is that these things are not being looked at by the Correctional Service of Canada. They are, in a sense, largely being ignored. Even the issue of the overrepresentation of Blacks in the SIUs or the fact that Blacks are spending more time in the SIUs is not something the Correctional Service of Canada itself ever talks about.
View Matthew Green Profile
NDP (ON)
Mr. Doob, can you also provide an analysis with regard to indigenous inmates, as I understand that they are perhaps even more overrepresented statistically in Canada?
Anthony Doob
View Anthony Doob Profile
Anthony Doob
2021-06-21 16:07
Well, they are certainly overrepresented in the Correctional Service of Canada. They're highly represented in the institutions and in the SIUs. I think the treatment in the SIUs between the two disadvantaged groups—Blacks and indigenous people—actually does vary. Some of our analysis would suggest that indigenous people are spending about the same amount of time, I believe, as the rest of the population in the SIUs once they get there. Indigenous people are more likely to get there in the first place.
I think what you have to consider is that each of these groups in a sense is being treated in different kinds of ways. All of them seem to be subject to the same kind of treatment, which is outside of what is contemplated by the legislation, to the point that we weren't able to find any groups that were being treated in the same way that the legislation would suggest they should be.
Emilie Coyle
View Emilie Coyle Profile
Emilie Coyle
2021-06-21 16:08
Thank you for that question. I think it's a really important one.
In the prisons designated for women across the country, because they're multi-level prisons, they have max, medium and minimum security, and we certainly see what are called the “max pods”. In those max pods, you see an over-classification, an overrepresentation, of indigenous women and gender-diverse folks.
In these pods, you have about three to five people who are on the same ranges day after day and have very little access to the rest of the prison. We really liken the treatment of those prisoners to the treatment of those who are found in other solitary confinement-like situations, just to bring that to your attention.
View Tako Van Popta Profile
CPC (BC)
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Dr. Doob, I was very shocked by your testimony the other day when you said that the application of our SIU operations in some cases falls within the internationally recognized categories of torture. You pointed out that the problem is more severe in the Pacific region than in, for example, the Ontario region.
In your evidence—and I'm quoting from the record—you also stated: “I never thought that in my career as a criminologist I would be comparing torture rates in institutions under the control of the Government of Canada.”
Could you expand on that, particularly with the comparison of the Pacific region to other parts? I'm from the Pacific region. That's why I'm interested.
Anthony Doob
View Anthony Doob Profile
Anthony Doob
2021-06-21 16:10
We took the definitions from the Mandela rules. We gave what we would consider to be a very conservative threshold for defining something as either solitary confinement or torture, so our numbers are probably lower than most people would have put them. We then looked at how many prisoners were in each of these regions and the proportion or the rate per thousand prisoners for this kind of treatment. We did find, as you already said in your question, enormous variability across regions. I think it's important.
Remember that the terms “solitary confinement” and “torture” are in effect technical definitions drawn from the Mandela rules. Here Jane Sprott and I are, criminologists talking about torture rates in different regions in our country. We found it rather disturbing that when we looked to see whether anybody had calculated torture rates in western countries, we weren't able to find them.
Results: 46 - 60 of 488 | Page: 4 of 33

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