Prison population not increasing despite tough-on-crime laws: Toews

WINNIPEG – Canada’s prison population has not exploded, contrary to opposition critics’ dire predictions about the government’s anti-crime laws, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said Wednesday.

The number of inmates in federal prisons as of June 30 stood at 14,965, Toews said, almost 3,000 below the level predicted for this year in 2009 by the Corrections Service of Canada and far below what the opposition in Parliament has been warning.

“The influx of new inmates has simply not materialized,” Toews said in Winnipeg.

“Contrary to predictions by our critics and the opposition, we have not seen the so-called substantive increase in offenders swamping the correctional system and creating untold new costs.”

The Conservative government has faced accusations that its tough-on-crime agenda, which includes more mandatory minimum sentences and longer sentences for some offences, would cause a boom in the inmate population that would require new prisons to be built.

Instead, the government is shutting down two older prisons – Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario and the Leclerc prison north of Montreal – and scrapping any plans to build new facilities.

That means the government will save $1.5 billion over the next seven years by foregoing capital spending requested by the department, Toews said.

While the prison population is lower than expected, officials point out the number of people behind bars is still growing.

Howard Sapers, who fields complaints from federal inmates as his job as Canada’s correctional investigator, has said some 1,000 extra inmates have been added to the system in recent years.

The government has already promised to add 2,700 new beds to existing facilities to ease over-crowding.