Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney announced Wednesday a plan to put forward legislation ensuring that more offenders given life sentences spend their entire lives behind bars (right now, they are eligible to apply for parole, usually after 25 years).
Who are Canada’s lifers? A few key figures on this prison population:
4,800
Number of offenders serving life sentences in Canada in 2013.
23
Percentage of the total federal inmate population serving either life or indeterminate sentences in 2013.
2,880
Total number of lifers who were incarcerated at that time.
1,862
Number of lifers on parole in 2013.
1,600
Lifers on full parole.
33
Percentage of applications for full parole from lifers granted by the Parole Board in 2013-14.
94
Number of lifers granted full parole in 2014.
271
Lifers on day parole.
3,467
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Number of lifers who had committed second-degree murder.
1,115
Lifers who had committed first-degree murder.
81
Percentage of community-supervised lifers serving time for second-degree (as opposed to first-degree) murder.
$135,000
Approximate cost, in 2011-12, to incarcerate one offender for one year in a maximum-security federal prison.
$101,000
Approximate cost, in 2011-12, to incarcerate one offender for one year in a medium-security federal prison.
Source: Statistics Canada, Corrections Canada and National Parole Board
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