Ontario Premier Doug Ford defended his government’s plan to build many more jails, saying the billions in cost will be worth it.
Ontario’s jails are well over capacity and the overcrowding has been worsening for years under Ford’s tenure as premier.
The province plans to add upward of 6,000 new jail beds by 2050, government documents obtained by The Canadian Press show.
About 80 per cent of inmates in provincial jails are awaiting trial and presumptively innocent. The provincial institutions hold people who are accused of a crime but not on bail, as well as those serving sentences of two years less a day. Inmates with longer sentences are housed in the federal prison system.
Jails don’t hold only people waiting for trial, though—if I recall correctly, people serving short sentences may also be confined in a jail rather than a prison, so the jail space also needs to scale with population (we’ve been having issues with jail and prison overcrowding for a good quarter-century). Therefore, we need more jail space and more prison space and a better-funded, better-staffed court system that can hear cases in a timely manner, but yeah, the court system is the most important part.
More mental health and social programs for families and youth is probably a better investment in reducing court/jail/prison volume.
It looks like 79% of people in jails are waiting for trial. That’s a lot.
Because bail reform hasn’t kept up with lagging wages and homeless numbers.
@HellsBelle @sbv
more reasons to abolish prisons.