Ms Molly Joyce:

From our perspective, it would be a complete redistribution of existing resources into providing proper mental health and addiction supports, in particular in the community. We have presented to the high-level task force. It is difficult for us because we are a penal reform organisation and we are looking at prison. We end up talking about prison all of the time when we really want to say that people should never get to the stage where they end up in prison, but so many of them do because of circumstances.

If we could, we should put the resources into the communities where we know there are high levels of people ending up in prison because of poverty and addiction and mental health, which is all related to socioeconomic disadvantages as well. With all of the services in those communities and generally with mental health and addiction, we would try to address the root causes so that people do not end up in a position where they end up in contact with the criminal justice system in the first place. If we were waving a magic wand that is where we would want to end up, focused on trying to address those issues at the very outset and actually seeing why people end up committing the offences; we would like to end up where we are not always just putting our resources into the reaction and the response.