Whitehorse, 5 March 2015—The Yukon Department of Justice designed and built the Whitehorse Correctional Centre to meet the territory’s needs for housing inmates. However, despite having this new facility, the Department is missing two key opportunities to better prepare offenders for successful reintegration into the community—while they are in the correctional centre and while they are under community supervision, says Michael Ferguson, Auditor General of Canada, in his report presented today to the Speaker of the Yukon Legislative Assembly.
“The Department is responsible for developing and providing access to programs and services to help prepare offenders for reintegration into the community through rehabilitation and healing,” said Mr. Ferguson. “We found that the Department is not providing offenders with sufficient access to rehabilitation programs.”
The audit found that most offenders who were not offered the rehabilitation programs identified for them while in the correctional centre were also not offered the programs while under community supervision. The audit also found that the Department is not adequately managing many aspects of community supervision, such as assessing offenders’ risk of reoffending. Since more offenders in Yukon are sentenced to community supervision than to incarceration, it is particularly important that the Department adequately support offenders who are serving sentences under community supervision.
“Addressing the problems we found in our audit will allow the Department to improve offenders’ chances for rehabilitation and better prepare them for successful reintegration into the community,”said Mr. Ferguson.
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The report “Corrections in the Yukon—Department of Justice” is available on the Office of the Auditor General of Canada website.
Ronnie Campbell
Assistant Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Cell phone: 613-866-5266
Email: Ronnie.Campbell@oag-bvg.gc.ca
or
Media Relations, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Tel.: 1-888-761-5953
Email: infomedia@oag-bvg.gc.ca
Twitter: OAG_BVG
