Look who's lagging: Gambling treatment in Canada

Say it ain't so: The only correctional facility in the country with an in-house gambling treatment program is in... Alberta? Meanwhile, the country's attitude towards treatment may be lightyears behind even the U.S.

It began after Gordon Leigh started noticing different types of people suddenly showing up to his addictions therapy groups. There was the middle-aged woman, caught for embezzling money from her employer. There was another, caught for fraud. They were non-violent people, jailed for the first time in their lives.

These people weren’t addicted to alcohol or drugs. They had gambling problems, but they couldn’t find treatment programs for their specific addictions.

It prompted Leigh, the executive director of the Lethbridge John Howard Society, to create such a program.

It was the first of its kind in Canada; a gambling awareness and prevention program given to 71 prisoners at the provincial Lethbridge Correctional Centre. A concurrent study, done in conjunction with the jail and a researcher at the University of Lethbridge, suggested the program was successful in impacting attitudes towards gambling.

Now, two years after the study’s completion, a version of the program is still running. It’s still the only in-house treatment program offered across the country, and Leigh can’t quite understand why.

“Prison is a good place to intervene. They’re there, you’ve got them,” says Leigh. “These people are in prison, and they don’t particularly want to come back. So why not treat the problem?”

If you don't cure the addiction, you're just going to have another offence. It's pretty well predictable.

But most correctional facilities don’t offer gambling treatment programs. That’s despite the fact some research suggests as many as one-third of inmates may have gambling problems, and half of crimes committed by incarcerated gamblers is done to support their habits.

“It’s a matter of funding,” says Leigh, whose current program costs about $25,000 yearly to run. The money comes from a provincial fund.

“If the funds are not there no one’s going to deliver the program. I suppose the situation is going to have to worsen a lot more before people are going to do anything about it.”

Lethbridge not withstanding, Canada’s attitude towards treatment seems to be well behind that of even the United States, where the focus seems to be heading towards deterring gambling-related offenders away from incarceration altogether.

Some jurisdictions are leading the way with gambling treatment courts modeled after the drug treatment courts, which are relatively entrenched in the U.S., even if the idea is still new to Canada.

Louisiana has such a program. It began after officials there noticed many offenders were going through the court system because of crimes committed to fund their gambling addictions: non-payment of child support, or fraud, for example.

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“The goal is to provide these individuals with treatment for their problems, rather than incarceration,” says Jennifer Cluck, spokesperson for Louisiana’s Attorney General’s office.

In place since 2004, officials say the cost of treating offenders is a fraction of what it would take to arrest and incarcerate them. The program is funded entirely by gaming revenue.

Canada isn’t anywhere near.

“I think the provinces need to understand much more about the intricacies and complexities of gambling addiction than they do now,” says Lethbridge’s Leigh.

“The people that I have seen who've ended up in jail would have benefited a lot more from something like a gambling court than the different forms of sentences than were actually given. The principles of a drug court or gambling court is to look at the issues of addiction. If you don't cure the addiction, you're just going to have another offence. It's pretty well predictable."

Tags: corrections canada, prison, treatment, gambling, addiction, gambling court