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News Release

Communiqué

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Ottawa, May 19, 2004 - Police and provincial and territorial correctional officials across Canada are sharing data about offenders through a project being carried out by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC).

The Honourable Anne McLellan, Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada, joined the Commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada in announcing the cooperative effort which involves police and government officials sharing information about offenders in an effort to further enhance public safety.

"One of the most powerful tools we have in fighting crime is information," said Minister McLellan. "When we share information about offenders, we are contributing to crime prevention. In an environment where threats to public safety take many forms and evolve rapidly, our responses must be creative, flexible and forward-looking, and above all, they must be integrated and coordinated."

As of the end of April, the province of British Columbia's correctional services and some of B.C.'s local police forces, including Vancouver and Victoria Police, have been connected to CSC's Offender Management System (OMS). The OMS database provides such important information as the criminal history of offenders and the status of their sentence.

This connection of the B.C. correctional services follows the signing of an agreement with the British Columbia Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General earlier last year, specifying among other things the security requirements and conditions applicable to the sharing of electronic information. This bilateral sharing of information also provides CSC with access to CORNET, B.C.'s electronic offender management system.

"The connection of provincial and territorial corrections to our Offender Management System is an important component of the Integrated Justice Information Initiative," said Commissioner McClung. "This initiative aims at improving information sharing across Canada's criminal justice system with the goal of ensuring fact-based decision-making and thus contributing to the safety of Canadians."

British Columbia is the fourth provincial/territorial correctional service to be connected to the OMS; the first three were Saskatchewan, Yukon and Quebec. Plans are currently in place to have the remaining provinces and territories connected to the OMS by the end of 2006.

Information on offenders in the community is shared with police via an application called InfoPol, which provides police with information in a format that is tailored to their needs about federal offenders under supervision in their jurisdiction and offenders who are unlawfully at large in Canada. The information captured in InfoPol provides police services with the offender profile, an electronic photograph of the offender and contact information concerning the parole officer in charge of the case. This information is stored in a database which the police can easily search.

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Backgrounder: The Offender Management System

• The Offender Management System (OMS) is a computerized information system used primarily by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) and the National Parole Board (NPB) to help manage offenders while in custody and on conditional release in the community. OMS contains approximately twenty-two thousand files on active federal offenders, including the 13,000 offenders incarcerated in federal institutions and the 9,000 on some form of conditional release in the community. The system also contains over 125,000 archived files from which provincial/territorial corrections primarily retrieve information.

• An offender's OMS file contains data on a wide variety of sentence and case information, including work and educational programs that are part of the offender's correctional plan, progress reports, conditional release decisions, community assessments, as well as incident reports, risk assessments and movement/security level.

• The system was developed over a decade ago in response to CSC/NPB needs in the area of offender information gathering, storage and retrieval and to address deficiencies in the dissemination of offender information as highlighted in various studies and reports over the years.

• The current system must be updated to enable it to keep pace with technological changes. The changes CSC implemented to date in the renewed OMS result in easier access to offender information for users, allowing electronic sharing of information with other criminal justice partners such as police forces, provincial and territorial corrections and parole boards that were receiving this information in a paper format. It will integrate other commercial offender-based systems to OMS such as Jail Management and Health Care, in order to provide a complete offender profile in one system. The renewal will also strengthen OMS links to other key information systems such as the Canadian Police Information Centre.

• The renewal of the Offender Management System is part of the federal government's Integrated Justice Information (IJI) Initiative to improve the safety of Canadians and strengthening information sharing among criminal justice partners. It is also an integral component of the Canada Public Safety Information Network (CPSIN), a network linking federal, provincial and municipal information technology systems and resources led by the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada.