The impact of multiple grievors in the offender redress process

Research Highlights: A small number of multiple grievors contribute substantially to the offender redress process at the final level.

Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) administers an internal offender redress process mandated by the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (CCRA) to fairly and expeditiously resolve grievances on a variety of matters within the jurisdiction of federal corrections. Recent research has found that internal efficiency strategies and expanded administrative capacity significantly reduced a persistent backlog of active final grievances.^{Footnote 1} However, studying the impact of those who actually submit a grievance to the final level is an important step towards ensuring that the offender redress process is fair, expeditious, sustainable and cost-effective.

Corporate data between Fiscal Year (FY) 2015-16 and 2017-18 were extracted from CSC’s Offender Management System on the following: 1) the offender population under federal jurisdiction, 2) the number of final level grievances received at CSC’s National Headquarters and 3) the number of offenders who submitted one or more grievance(s). To estimate the impact that individual offenders have had on the grievance process, the number of final level submissions received from the top one, five and ten offenders were examined.

As reflected in the table below, between FY 2015-16 and 2017-18, CSC National Headquarters received 12,778 final level grievances, however, these were found to have been submitted by 3,820 individual offenders. As displayed in the figure, there were substantial contributions in which some offenders availed themselves to the final level of the offender redress process. On average, over a three-year period, the offender (top one) with the greatest number of submissions was responsible for 13% of the final level grievances being received; 26% were from the top five offenders; and, 32% were from the top ten offenders.

This study highlights the fact that a relatively small number of multiple grievors have had a disproportionate impact on CSC’s offender redress process. These findings underscore the need to find effective ways of addressing the workload produced by offenders who submit a disproportionate number of grievances.

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Prepared by: Larry Motiuk and Andre Arnet-Zargarian