Alternative federal budget 2026: Incarceration

Overview

The Canadian federal prison system needs significant change. Though it is legislatively mandated to serve public safety by being reintegrative, it is a costly, ineffective system which keeps many in cycles of incarceration, in prison for years and decades, and is a system with unreasonable deficits in access to health, family, and opportunity for incarcerated people.¹Gwen Balfour, Kelly Hannah-Moffat, and Sarah Turnbull, “Planning for Precarity? Experiencing the Carceral Continuum of Imprisonment and Reentry,” in After Imprisonment: Special Issue, Emerald Publishing Limited, 2018.

Post-release, barriers to work and housing prevent people who experience incarceration from economic and social participation, and incarceration in Canada leads to vastly disproportionate poor social, economic, physical health, and mental health outcomes.²Shawn McAleese, “Job Search, Suspended: Changes to Canada’s Pardon Program and the Impact on Finding Employment,” in After Prison: Navigating Employment and Reintegration, ed. Rose Ricciardelli and Adelle M. Forth Peters, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017; Michael J. To et al., “The Effect of Incarceration on Housing Stability among Homeless and Vulnerably Housed Individuals in Three Canadian Cities: A Prospective Cohort Study,” Canadian Journal of Public Health 107, 2016.

Canada’s federal population of incarcerated people constitutes approximately 13,000 people in penitentiaries across 53 prisons (six designated for women and 47 designated for men) nationally, with an additional approximate 7,000 people in the community on parole at any given time³Public Safety Canada, Corrections and Conditional Release Statistical Overview 2022, 2023, https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/ccrso-2022/ccrso-2022-en.pdf.. Despite the relatively small size of the Canadian federal prisoner population, administering federal incarceration costs the Canadian public $3.86 billion for 2025-26.⁴Treasury Board Secretariat, The 2025–26 Main Estimates, May 2025, https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-board-secretariat/services/planned-government-spending/government-expenditure-plan-main-estimates/2025-26-estimates.html.

The estimated annual cost to incarcerate one person in a Canadian prison designated for men is $150,505. This increases to approximately $259,654 per year per person for federal prisons designated for women.⁵Department of Justice Canada, Costs of Crime in Canada, 2014, https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/jr/ccc2014/system-systeme.html. For the approximately 9,000 people who are completing their sentences in the community on parole, this cost drops to $38,418 annually.⁶2022 Corrections and Conditional Release Statistical Overview

System keeps people disadvantaged

Canada’s federally sentenced population represents very disadvantaged people. Canada’s mass incarceration of Indigenous peoples,⁷Paul Robinson, Taylor Small, Anna Chen, and Mark Irving, “Over-representation of Indigenous persons in adult provincial custody, 2019/2020 and 2020/2021,” Juristat, Statistics Canada, July 12, 2023, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2023001/article/00004-eng.htm. and overrepresentation of Black people⁸Department of Justice Canada, Overrepresentation of Black People in the Canadian Criminal Justice System, fact sheet, December 2022, https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/jr/obpccjs-spnsjpc/index.html. is worsened by intersections of poverty and social marginalization among impacted populations. Individuals tend to enter prison with alarming deficiencies in educational and professional experience. The average educational completion level among federally sentenced people at the onset of their prison sentence is only Grade 8.

While high school completion is prioritized for people during federal incarceration, access to post-secondary education is extremely limited. However, 30 per cent of the incarcerated population have long-term or life sentences, and the failure on Canada’s part to promote access to post-secondary is a costly one.

Post-secondary education in prison increases safety, as well as peoples’ abilities to find meaningful work post-incarceration.⁹See Walls to Bridges, “Media, Publications and Reports”, https://wallstobridges.ca/readings-reports-media/. Education reduces recidivism and tragic individual outcomes associated with incarceration, and alleviates the high public cost of incarceration. Despite the strong evidence correlating access to education to lower risk of future poverty and reincarceration, very few federally sentenced people can pursue post-secondary education behind prison walls.

Assumptions that incarcerated people need to be punished underpin policy change and continue to justify intentionally harsh conditions in Canadian prisons. Other assumptions persist that such problems are natural or inevitable consequences of a prison system. Yet much of the costliness, and harmful nature of Canada’s federal prison system is easily resolvable. Both the problems within, and the solutions to resolve issues in Canadian prisons are clear—they need only be implemented.

Health, addiction, and incarceration in Canada

One clear example of unnecessary practice in Canadian prisons relates to addiction. Approximately 80 per cent of federally sentenced people have substance use issues, yet addictions treatment programs are not part of prison programming. Instead, most federally sentenced people are put on opioid antagonistic therapy (suboxone or methadone) and kept on these medications for the duration of their incarceration.¹⁰Some volunteer community and faith based groups provide access to narcotics anonymous meetings, but these are limited, inconsistent, and should be supplementary to treatment programming. In the community, this medication is meant to be accompanied by therapy, but in prison, it simply replaces street drugs. Addiction is a leading contributing factor of incarceration, yet many individuals are released from prison into active addiction.

People who become incarcerated also disproportionately enter with mental health diagnoses. But incarceration itself also worsens, produces, and increases risk of adverse mental health outcomes, including addiction, depression, anxiety disorders, and suicide.¹¹Relative to the general population. These same mental health outcomes are also disproportionately experienced by those who work in frontline positions in prisons.

Being incarcerated is traumatic. Prisons’ harsh, violent, and unstable living conditions exacerbate pre-existing conditions, and create disorders in previously healthy people. Increasing literature on the presence of post-traumatic stress disorder among people who are incarcerated and work in prisons, and a similarly coined ‘post-incarceration syndrome’ captures the effects of incarceration on people’s wellness¹²Katie Rose Quandt and Alexi Jones, “Research Roundup: Incarceration can cause lasting damage to mental health,” Prison Policy Initiative, May 12, 2021. during and post-incarceration.

A prison system that creates illness and then downloads the burden of responding to illness onto Canada’s already exhausted public health care system should be immediately reformed to address and resolve this. Prison environments add further to the public bill by producing chronic physical health illness in individuals, to such an extent that long-term incarceration in Canada reduces individual life expectancy by 20 years compared to the general population.¹³Adeline Iftene, Punished for Aging: Vulnerability, Rights, and Access to Justice in Canadian Penitentiaries, 2019, University of Toronto Press.

Incarceration prevents people from economic and social participation

Incarceration fractures families and weakens community resilience and public safety by preventing economic and social participation. When someone becomes federally incarcerated, their family and community become directly financially responsible for them, as federally incarcerated people work for dollars a day, but incur high costs of living behind prison walls resulting from inflated food, communication and additional costs.

This produces generational poverty and systemic inequality, as, upon release, formerly incarcerated people—and their social networks—are left with the aftermath of intersecting impacts of trauma, untreated addiction, and long gaps in employment.

Post-incarceration outcomes have long been dismal, as incarceration not only sustains but deepens the presence of many socio-economic disadvantages, ranging from social stigma and poverty via insecure housing and homelessness, to chronic mental and physical illness, social isolation, and precarious employment. Restrictive parole conditions,¹⁴Nyki Kish and Tamara Humphrey, “Problematizing Perpetual Punishment: Tensions and Impacts Across News Reports and Lived Realities of the Canadian Life Sentence”, 2024, https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/doc/2024CanLIIDocs2092. criminal records, and gaps in resumes prevent many formerly incarcerated people from finding meaningful work. Background checks in housing applications move previously incarcerated people into vulnerable housing environments, and rather than being able to meaningfully contribute to society, post-incarceration conditions fuel cycles of incarceration.

The solutions are known

Incarceration should onlybe used as a last resort. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recognizes that incarceration has a “detrimental social impact” and mass incarceration produces a “deep social transformation in families and communities.” It has called on nations to account for the actual funds spent on the upkeep of each incarcerated person (usually significantly higher than a person sentenced to community-based alternatives) and the indirect costs: social, economic, and health costs that are “difficult to measure, but which are immense and long-term.”

Many efforts to address problems in the prison system are not implemented, such as Canada’s Black Justice Strategy, Canada’s Indigenous Justice Strategy, the draft National Action Plan on Mental Health and Criminal Justice,¹⁵Mental Health Commission of Canada, “National Action Plan on Mental Health and Criminal Justice” https://mentalhealthcommission.ca/justicenap/. and the Reduction of Recidivism Framework Act, which received royal assent on June 29, 2021. These strategies and frameworks echo one another’s solutions and call for less incarceration, and more community resources. From Canada’s Black Justice strategy:

Decarceration: Canada must aim to reduce the overall current rate of persons incarcerated relative to the population by 30 per cent by 2034, and given levels of overrepresentation, incarceration rates for Black and Indigenous people must be reduced by 50 per cent of the current rate, relative to their proportion of the population, in this time. We take a broad view of decarceration to mean not only the release of people who are currently in custody, but also to reduce the number of people entering custodial facilities in the first place.

The Federal Framework to Reduce Recidivism provides a strong overarching vision of decarceration, by supporting five identified pillars central to breaking cycles of incarceration:

• Housing
• Employment
• Health
• Education
• Positive support networks

The act directs the government that these pillars can be achieved through the following measures:

• Implement evidence-based programs aimed at reducing recidivism.
• Promote the reintegration of people who have been incarcerated back into the community through access to adequate and ongoing resources as well as employment opportunities.
• Support faith-based and communal initiatives that aim to rehabilitate people who have been incarcerated.
• Implement international best practices related to the reduction of recidivism.
• Evaluate and improve risk assessment instruments and procedures to address racial and cultural biases.

In November 2023, the Federal Framework to Reduce Recidivism implementation plan was released but there has been no investment to implement the framework.

One clear action Canada can take to lessen the scope of Canada’s federal prison is to reform the Criminal Record Act, so that people who have completed their sentences and are trying to work and build good lives are not permanently excluded from meaningful jobs and safe housing.

Canada’s current criminal record legislation significantly adds to the burgeoning bill Canadians pay for incarceration. Long after people’s sentences end, restrictive criminal record legislation in Canada prevents them from gaining and maintaining employment and safe housing, among other things.

One in nine Canadians has a criminal record. That translates to 4.3 million people who are directly impacted, and we can add at least eight million more (a conservative estimate) people who are impacted as family members and dependents of people with criminal records. The pathway to a free and automatic spent record regime (where an individual’s criminal record is suspended automatically after they complete their sentence, rather than their having to apply for a suspension) has been outlined in Bill S-207: An Act to amend the Criminal Records Act, to make consequential amendments to other Acts and to repeal a regulation. Prioritizing criminal record reform is a timely and much-needed government action yet supported by diverse stakeholders, including the Parole Board of Canada and various police organizations.

Actions

Drawing from existing strategies and frameworks¹⁶Canada’s Indigenous Justice Strategy, Canda’s Black Justice Strategy, the Federal Framework to Reduce Recidivism, the draft by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and the draft Action Plan on Criminal Justice and Mental Health for Canada set to be released by the Mental Health Commission of Canada in 2025., the AFB offers a roadmap to meaningfully and responsibly reduce incarceration by 30 per cent by 2035. To achieve this,

The AFB will amend the Criminal Records Act and implement a free and automatic spent record process, turning to the model outlined in Bill S-207 and supported by the Fresh Start Coalition. This will ensure that Canadians who have completed their sentences and who are trying to live good lives are not permanently excluded from good jobs and safe housing by having criminal records. This amendment will save Canadians $25 million over the next five years and can be allocated to implement the Federal Framework to Reduce Recidivism.¹⁷Parliamentary Budget Office, “Legislative Costing Note: Bill S-208 (43rd Parliament, 2nd Sessions) An Act to amend the Criminal Records Act, to make consequential amendments to other Acts and to repeal a regulation (expiry of criminal records without application or fee)”, October 2020, https://www.pbo-dpb.ca/en/publications/LEG-2021-039-M–S-208-expiry-criminal-records-without-application-or-fee–S-208-expiration-casiers-judiciaires-sans-demande-ni-frais-demande.

The AFB will invest an additional $100 million a year to implement the solutions identified across the Federal Framework to Reduce Recidivism, Canada’s Black Justice Strategy, Canada’s Indigenous Justice Strategy, and the Action Plan on Criminal Justice and Mental Health for Canada.

The AFB will amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act to create a mechanism to allow the Correctional Service of Canada to authorize the discharge of individuals from custody at the point of readiness, which could be prior to the fixed parole eligibility and statutory release dates determined at the time of sentencing. This is an essential step to begin shifting Canada’s catch-all use of incarceration to a more limited and appropriate use of incarceration. It will allow the timely discharge of Indigenous Peoples and others whose needs are not being served by the conditions of prison.

The AFB will introduce integrated substance use treatment in penitentiaries that aligned with the standards of community-based models and deepen partnerships and pathways for community-based access to equivalent programs

The AFB will transform the policy framework and mental health service model in federal prisons into a model that is measurably consistent with Canadian and World Health Organization standards of care.

The AFB will introduce vocational development assessments into the Correctional Service of Canada intake and planning processes, diversify and expand access to meaningful vocational opportunities by partnering with community-based employment counselling/ development programs, andsupport post-secondary access for incarcerated people. The AFB will improve support for existing initiatives such as Walls to Bridges Canada and Inside Out, that facilitate access to post-secondary education behind prison walls

To support the high amounts of current frontline prison staff to transition into new community-based employment work, the AFB will support training and bridging initiatives to support training opportunities to transform correctional security positions into rehabilitative and supportive roles, and where possible, into community-based positions.

The AFB will also support research into policy solutions toward decarceration, specifically developing viable alternatives that would increase the application of community-based alternatives to incarceration rooted in transformative justice models, diversion programs, and national scaling of First Nations courts and Indigenous models of justice alternatives. It will also expand existing, but underutilized community-based sentencing alternatives (e.g., Corrections and Conditional Release Act Section 81 and 84 releases, conditional sentencing, and conditional community release), and develop and implement an efficient metric to consistently measure recidivism.

The AFB will conduct an external impact evaluation of Canada’s decarceration strategy to centre the experiences of impacted populations and ensure the framework meaningfully responds to systemic discrimination. It will deepen evidence-based practice and ensure that carceral institutions are measured and evaluated according to standard practice in the social sector. The AFB will continually identify and move people into Indigenous justice systems, and community-based alternatives to incarceration, substance use treatment, and transformative justice programming.

Finally, the AFB will invest in a public education campaign to provide informed public understandings of why punishment models fail, and cost everyone in society. Public education will focus on the benefits to individuals, communities, and society when everyone who wants to contribute to their community is given a fair chance to.