Marsi cho. Today I would like to talk about some unfortunate government spending which is 100 per cent preventable, but we are all humans and most likely, there will always be crime and incarcerations. Thank you. The cost of our corrections services is about $39.5 million per year. At any given time, the correction facilities are housing about 200 adult offenders. The daily cost of one person incarcerated in corrections is $252 per day, and that was a number from about six or seven years ago. My guess is that it has gone up considerably and it's around $100,000 per year per person. It is estimated that 85 per cent of the crimes in NWT are alcohol- and drug-related. In addition, Mr. Speaker, 90 per cent of inmates have additional issues. These issues include mental health problems, anger management issues, physical and behavioural limitations, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and other cognitive disorders, and low literacy and education levels.
According to the Auditor General in 2015, most of the inmate population in NWT is Aboriginal. Eighteen per cent of the federally incarcerated population is Aboriginal, but only 2.8 per cent of the population in Canada is Aboriginal. All this tells me that work must be done to change the numbers and to turn individuals that are repeat offenders into productive members of society, as opposed to people who do not have the tools to stay out of jail.
