The Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) wants the province to fund the hiring of 100 new probation and parole officers.
A recent freedom of information request shows 4,500 warrants are outstanding in Ontario for the arrest of offenders in violation of the conditions of their community sentence.
Scott McIntyre — a probation and parole officer and union representative — believes a few hundred of those outstanding warrants are in Windsor-Essex.
"And these officers would obviously have the proper personal safety equipment," says McIntyre. "Their mandate would include doing compliance checks; looking for the whereabouts of offenders wanted on outstanding breach probation warrants; warrant execution with support of police, and offender transportation."
He says the additional officers are critical to try and stop many of the offenders — who are unaccounted for — from reoffending.
"You've got the nation's highest caseload and you've got the second lowest spending of any province, so it's not a large leap to conclude that you're going to have a big problem with recidivism," says McIntyre.
OPSEU says there are 45,000 offenders serving community sentences in Ontario with only 865 probation and parole officers to supervise them.