Ex-convict Pat Kincaid says a prison treatment program that helped him make sense of decades of distorted thinking was the key to going straight. “It taught me how to make decisions the proper way and go over the consequences of my actions,” said Kincaid, who was paroled from a minimum-security prison in Kingston nearly two years ago and has since lived crime free. Thousands of federal offenders are not taking intensive programs like the one Kincaid credits for his turnaround, according to figures (doc after jump) compiled by Corrections Canada and recently released.
In 2009-10, 5,539 inmates took part in programs designed to address their key criminal factors, compared to 8,775 who participated in 2000. The figures also show that 40% of offenders who were identified as requiring programs in 2009-10 (CSC’s fiscal year) did not get them.
Corrections Canada said it could not immediately provide comment (I asked for comment at 11 a.m. Friday and at 5 p.m. was told they couldn’t get me any explanation – they promised to get back to me Monday)
In 2000, nearly 90% of offenders who needed programs accessed them.
“I think Canadians should be concerned for two reasons,” said prison ombudsman Howard Sapers. “I think that they should first be concerned from a dollars-and-cents standpoint … incarceration is expensive and it’s a public safety issue.
“Participation and successful completion of core correctional programming decreases recidivism, so it decreases crime.”
Research, including some by Corrections Canada staff, has shown that treatment can cut recidivism among high-risk offenders by as much as 30%. In the past, Sapers has praised Corrections Canada for developing some of the best treatment programs in the world.
Kincaid said he took a cognitive skills program while he was behind bars at minimum-security Beaver Creek Institution in Gravenhurst, Ont., about six years ago.
“It was the first program that I took,” said the 58-year-old thief, who had been committing break-ins since he was a teenager. “I picked up stuff that I should have known since I was a kid.”
The program taught him that there are always choices in life, he said. It allowed him to break a roughly 40-year cycle of reoffending and re-incarceration.
“It obviously put me on the right track because I haven’t been in trouble for two years,” he said. The program led him to take others.
The numbers were released by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews in response to questions by Liberal critic Mark Holland, the MP for Ajax-Pickering. The 12-page document provided by Toews shows that spending on what Corrections calls “nationally recognized correctional programs” increased 35% between 2004 and 2009. Corrections spent $75 million on the programs in 2009, roughly 3% of its total budget of $2.2 billion. The programs address “criminogenic factors” and do not include inmate education and work initiatives.
Sapers said Corrections is failing to deliver programs because of a lack of staff and space inside penitentiaries.
“They’ve recognized that they have a problem and they are trying to do some things about it,” he said. “I would say that these efforts, while they are commendable, are very tentative and really not robust enough to meet the challenge.”
Corrections is testing a new model of delivering programs in the Pacific region and, for the first time, is providing programs to inmates who are new to the system and are still in the assessment process.
The document released by Toews blames the discrepancy between the number of offenders identified as requiring programs and those participating on “data quality issues” in the computer system that tracks offenders, initial referrals that are later changed and refusals by offenders.
Sapers said he doesn’t necessarily accept these explanations.
“In our experience, in the majority of cases where an offender has not completed a program, it’s not because they voluntarily withdrew or declined to participate,” he said. “It’s because they were denied access to it in a timely way or other matters come up that interfered with their participation in it.”
Corrections is spending $2 billion to add new cells for a burgeoning inmate population. In the past five months, expansions have been announced for 30 existing penitentiaries including $158 million announced Monday to add more than 600 cells at eight prisons in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Sapers said he’s anxious to see if more program space is part of the renovation plans.
“We suspect that it won’t be,” he said. “We suspect that they may be using designs that reflect exactly what’s already in existence.”
He noted that Corrections already is struggling to deliver programs at some prisons.
At Edmonton Institution, a maximum-security prison in Alberta, group treatment programs have been curtailed because of security concerns about convicts with conflicting gang affiliations.
“There are literally no common programs being offered, so any programming that is taking place is taking place on an individual basis inside the cell,” Sapers said.
(this story appeared first on the Postmedia News website)
Here’s the document that was the starting point for this story. The document, a response to written questions by Liberal prisons critic Mark Holland came from Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. This document was passed on to me by Ottawa researcher and Phd student Justin Piche, who has a comprehensive blog that tracks government activity related to corrections:
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