VANCOUVER — Two out of three B.C. criminals serving their sentences in the community instead of jail may not be completing rehabilitation programs aimed at preventing repeat offences, according to British Columbia’s auditor general.
Probation officers may require offenders to seek counselling or attend programs aimed at stopping substance abuse, domestic violence or sex offences to reduce the chance that they will re-offend.
About half of B.C.’s 24,000 offenders who served sentences outside of jail in 2010-11 were ordered to complete a rehabilitation program — called an intervention.
But in an audited random sample of 60 offenders, only 35 per cent of those who required interventions completed their programs, according to the report written by Auditor General John Doyle.
About 12,000 offenders required interventions in 2010 and 2011, suggesting that thousands of the ordered rehabilitation programs were never completed.
The Community Corrections and Corporate Programs (CCCP) of the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General wasn’t able to confirm the number of offenders with incomplete programs by deadline.
Intervention programs are targeted at offenders deemed medium or high risk to reoffend as well those convicted of domestic abuse. Interventions may also include training or employment programs.
It costs $194 for each day an offender spends in jail in B.C. An offender who serves a sentence in the community costs taxpayers only $7 per day, according to the December 2011 report, which noted that 90 per cent of offenders in B.C. serve their sentences outside of jail.
CCCP received a scolding review from the auditor general in several areas, including failing to properly measure its own success at reducing further offences, poor training of its 450 probation officers, and insufficient record keeping of offenders’ risk to commit more crimes.
Doyle also highlighted the fact that CCCP acknowledges that its own probation officers are overworked.
B.C. probation officers have an average case load of nearly 64 clients each. That’s second only to Ontario which has 66.5 clients per officer, and well above the national average of 51 clients per officer. Case load increased by 28 per cent since 2005-06, according to the report.
“Inadequate supervision that fails to reduce re-offending not only represents a missed opportunity to improve an offender’s future, it also had broader implications for the general public in terms of public safety and costs,” Doyle wrote his findings.
A failure to monitor offenders’ response to interventions and their fulfilment of sentence conditions could result in more crime, he said.
Like other parts of B.C.’s cash-strapped justice system, there are not enough resources for probation officers to manage their case loads effectively, said Robert Gordon, director of the school of criminology at Simon Fraser University.
In order to get by, community corrections has adopted a risk assessment approach to offender management, which requires probation officers to focus their efforts on those believed most likely to re-offend, he said.
“But the probation officer is so overloaded that he or she is unable to follow up to see whether the offender is doing . . . what was required,” he said.
Community corrections is an important part of the justice system and is known to reduce recidivism better than jail, Gordon said, noting that CCCP’s recent lack of success could harm the “reputation of the corrections service and its once fine record of management.”
Word could get around among offenders that the current community sentencing system is weak, he added.
A spokeswoman for the ministry said in an email that many offenders are simply not motivated to comply with their case plans. If the interventions are part of court ordered conditions, breach of probation charges can be pursued, she noted, adding that roughly 75 per cent of clients don’t come back under community supervision for a new offence within a two-year time frame.
However, Doyle criticized CCCP’s method at calculating re-offences, pointing out that re-offending criminals who have yet to be sentenced within those two years are not included in the rate.
The union representing probation officers said there isn’t enough time or manpower to get the job done right.
“If you have 64 clients and you work an average of 23 days in a month, you don’t get a whole lot of time,” said Doug Kinna, from the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union.
B.C. is the only province that requires its probation officers to facilitate core intervention programs directly, which requires regular meetings involving up to 12 offenders at a time.
Other provinces contract out intervention programs, Kinna said. “In B.C. they do it in-house and it’s more of a strain,” he said. “At the end of the day something has got to give.”
The failure to complete interventions could have consequences in our communities, said the NDP’s public safety critic, Kathy Corrigan. “We have to be concerned about community safety.
“When a judge decides that being in the community is the right way to go (for an offender), I think they’re doing that believing that those people are going to be closely watched and are going to complete their program,” she said.
Simply adding more probation officers might not be the answer, Corrigan said, pointing to Doyle’s criticism of CCCP’s failure to monitor its own performance.
“Job one is to put the (auditor general’s) recommendations into place so we have a better way to track what’s happening in community corrections,” she said.
Among his recommendations, Doyle called for the CCCP to do a better job publicly reporting its overall rate of reducing recidivism.
Other recommendations included providing an assessment of its staffing gaps, reviewing probation officer training, improving documentation of offenders’ risk analysis, tracking enforcement and ensuring that all intervention programs are completed.
“Once interventions have been identified, probation officers must then work to implement them and ensure completion,” Doyle wrote. “At a minimum, probation officers in B.C. are required to evaluate each offender’s progress every six months or whenever a chance in the offender’s circumstances occurs.”
Otherwise, Doyle added, offenders “may commit additional crimes while in the community.”
The ministry accepted each of the recommendations, and a follow up review of their implementation by the auditor general is due in April 2013.
Vancouver Sun