Performance Assurance

Evaluation Report: The Section 81 Agreement between the Native Counselling Services of Alberta and the Correctional Services of Canada; The Stan Daniels Healing Centre

File #394-2-30

Evaluation Branch
Performance Assurance Sector
October 7, 2005

EVALUATION METHOD

Sample Composition

Key Sources

Information was collected from individuals and groups considered to be primary stakeholders as specified in the Section 81 of Agreement; specifically, current and former residents of the Centre, community representatives, and staff members from the NCSA, the Stan Daniels Healing Centre, the Grierson Centre, the District Director Northern Alberta/Northwest Territories District Parole, and CSC. Overall, 65 were people interviewed.

Stakeholders interviewed from the Native Counselling Services of Alberta and the Stan Daniels Healing Centre were: the Chief Executive Officer of the NCSA; the Centre's Program Director, Director and former Director, Assistant Director, Deputy Director of Operations and the Executive Assistant; an Escorting Officer, a Program Officer, the Healing Centre Elder, three Living Unit officers, and four Parole Officers (two Institutional Parole Officers and two Community Parole Officers); former residents residing in the community at the time of the interviews (n=6) and residents at the Centre at the time of the interviews, (11 inmates, 8 offenders on a discretionary release, and 4 on statutory release with a residency condition).

Stakeholders interviewed from CSC and the National Parole Board were: the Director General Aboriginal Initiatives, National Headquarters, the Regional Administrator, Aboriginal Initiatives (Prairie Region); 4 Parole Supervisors, a National Parole Board staff member (an Area Manager for Northern Alberta); a CSC Psychologists and Elder, an Institutional Parole Officer - Grierson, and a Legal Counsel from CSC's Legal Services, National Headquarters.

Community Stakeholders interviewed: Eleven (11) stakeholders from the Edmonton community were interviewed. They were the Executive Director of the Friendship Centre; the Director of the Youth Development Centre; a representative from the Aboriginal Community Service; a Community Help Centre (CHC) Chairperson; the Project Co-ordinator for Church of Work; instructors at the Correctional Service and Social Work Programs (2); an Employment Counsellor; Detectives at the Edmonton Police Service - High Risk Offender unit and High Risk Enforcement Apprehensive Team (2); and one previous Stan Daniels employee.

Automated Data

Information was also collected from Residential Services Statements submitted to CSC from the NCSA. These statements are maintained for billing purposes, and were used to identify all offenders who were at the Centre at any point in time between May 1^st, 1999 and June 1^st, 2005 (N=1,155). CSC's Offender Management System (OMS) was used to generate a matched cohort for comparison purposes (n=1,155). The matched cohort was drawn from male offenders either incarcerated in a minimum security institution or supervised in the Prairie region between May 1^st, 1999 and June 1^st, 2005. Matching criteria were sentence length, risk level and age at time of admission. These matching criteria introduced controls for time, opportunity and tendency in the research design. The random sample was also stratified on ethnicity groupings (Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) within offender status groupings (inmate, parole, statutory release). This was done to ensure that comparisons reflected exposure to the Stan Daniels Healing Centre rather than characteristics associated with a particular ethnic demographic of the offender population.

The key data source for the cost-effectiveness analyses was CSC's Cost of Maintaining Offenders (COMO) data base. This data base is used by CSC to estimate the cost of keeping offenders in the federal correctional system^[29]. The Stan Daniels Healing Centre supervises offenders who were transferred from local minimum security institutions, Community Correctional Centres (CCC) and parole offices. As such, COMO was used to identify the cost of maintaining offenders in those locations for comparative purposes. Thus, costs associated to all minimum security institutions, CCCs and parole offices in the Prairie region were considered, including: Rockwood Institution, Riverbend Institution, Grande Cache Institution, Pe Sâkâstêw, Grierson, Drumheller Institution (Annex), Bowden Institution, Osborne Centre, and Oskana Centre. Since region-specific costs were not available for District Parole Offices through COMO, the national average was used.

Document Review

Documents reviewed for various components of the evaluation were:

• the Section 81 Agreement for the Provision of Correctional Services and for the Transfer of Aboriginal Offenders to the Care and Custody of the Native Counselling Services of Alberta (including amendments),
• relevant Sections of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act. Specifically, Sections 80 to 84 “Aboriginal Offenders”,
• a 2003 CSC audit of the agreement,
• the protocols and procedures for transfer of offenders,
• a NCSA Statement of Revenue and Expenditure, and reports generated through CSC’s automated comptrollership system, and
• one National and 21 Regional Investigation Reports.

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^[29] Some of the primary cost components that are incorporated into COMO are those associated with staff salaries, the employee benefit plan, staff training, human resource management, correctional programs, inmate food and clothing, medical services, library services, housekeeping, transferring offenders from one institution to another, safety and security devices, and engineering and maintenance. The costs for common/shared services (for example, personnel, material and utilities) are distributed between adjacent correctional facilities, while capital costs (land, facilities and buildings etc.) are excluded from COMO.

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