The justice system is doing nothing to help deal with chronic offenders, says Delta's police chief, and building more jails isn't going to improve the situation.
"We don't think we need more jails," said Chief Jim Cessford, adding he would like to see that money used to restructure the system to better help people with mental health and addiction issues.
About 45 per cent of all calls Delta police officers respond to involve a person with a mental health issue, prompting the department to make some changes to address the growing problem.
In 2008, the department partnered with Delta Mental Health to establish the Community Health Intervention Program, formalizing an already strong working relationship between the two agencies and developing an outreach service that sees a dedicated police officer regularly liaise with a mental health staff member.
Initially the program was expected to deal with 10 to 15 high-risk individuals a year, but in 2008 the officer saw 685 files, a number that grew to more than 800 last year. Cessford said the department just added a second officer to the unit to deal with the increasing workload.
While police deal with many offenders only once, or a handful of times, there are others who come into contact with officers regularly, even hundreds of times, and there is a direct link between chronic offenders and substance abuse or mental health disorders.
"The issue of chronic offenders and the correlation to substance abuse and mental health disorders is complex," Cessford said in a recent report to the Delta police board. "Most chronic offenders suffer from a range of issues that make them difficult to treat and highly likely to re-offend."
At any give time, Delta police officers are dealing with between 10 and 20 chronic offenders, which put a strain on police resources.
"Chronic offenders tend to have very few support networks and are often rejected by their communities," Cessford said. "They live in a vicious and tragic cycle of mental illness, substance abuse and criminal activity. They know no other way of living and to break the cycle for many is seemingly impossible, frustrating the efforts of police, the courts and corrections."
Many chronic offenders get caught in a cycle of minor crime - stealing from cars and other property offences - to support their addiction. Once caught by police, most will
spend just a few weeks or months in jail - not long enough to get any sort of treatment, Cessford said - before being released back onto the streets where the cycle begins again.
One such chronic offender in Delta is only 20 but has had 271 run-ins with police since 2008 and has been charged 43 times for various offences.
Suffering from schizophrenia, he is a heavy drug user who has admitted he hears voices and hallucinates.
Most of his interactions with police are due to mental health issues, causing a disturbance and not complying with court orders.
Another example is a 26-year-old who has 251 entries in the police database and has been charged 70 times, primarily for property crimes and not complying with court orders.
"(He) commits crime to support his daily drug habit (including crack and coloured meth), and is reluctant to attend any treatment facility," Cessford said in his report.
While not diagnosed with any mental health problems, he is often high on drugs when he commits these crimes.
"Incarceration has not deterred [him] from committing crime. Upon release from prison [he] often enters rehabilitation for a few days, relapses and goes on a drug binge and crime spree."
While many chronic offenders commit mostly minor crimes, there is the potential for more.
Just last year, Delta police had to Taser a 26-year-old man after he broke into several homes in Ladner and Tsawwassen and stole a car. When police caught up with him, he was high on coloured meth, acting erratically, pacing back and forth, waving a weapon around and yelling at officers to shoot him.
Police had to force their way into the home and Taser the man after he took off his shirt and started cutting himself, eventually stabbing himself in the neck.
Cessford said many chronic offenders are simply falling through the cracks of the system, unable to get treatment for their addiction because of their mental health issues and vice versa.
"There's a real disconnect here," he said. "They don't need to be in jail."
Cessford said there needs to be a change in how the justice system deals with chronic offenders because as it stands, the current one isn't working.
"We've named the elephant in the room - that elephant is jails don't work.
"There are a record number of inmates in the provincial corrections system and over half have been diagnosed with a substance abuse problem or mental health disorder," the chief said.
Keeping all those people in prison is expensive. The average daily cost to house a male prisoner in the federal system is $304; female prisoners cost $587 per day. In B.C., it costs $202 per day, or $74,000 a year, to keep a prisoner.
"Prison is the most expensive approach to managing offenders and with the Canadian prison system costing over $4 billion per year, there is a need to evaluate the current approach to chronic offenders," Cessford stated in his report.
The chief points to Texas as an example of how making changes to the system can work.
Cessford said he would like to see a system where chronic offenders dealing with mental health and/or addiction issues are more often sentenced to treatment or daily counseling than jail time.
His report will be taken to the B.C. Association of Police Boards and the B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police in the hopes it will be passed on to the national associations.
He said it will also be presented to Delta council with the hope civic politicians will look for support for the issue from the Union of B.C. Municipalities and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities later this year.
