National Post (National Edition)
DO CANADA’S PRISONERS DESERVE A RAISE?
A court will soon determine what’s fair to pay inmates. But critics wonder if taxpayers should be paying them at all to make products that compete with the private sector.
Surrounded by hundreds of prisoners in the Collins Bay Penitentiary yard in Kingston, Ont., Jarrod Shook listened while a fellow member of the inmate committee delivered news that wasn’t going to be well-received.
It was 2013, and the committee had just learned the governing federal Conservatives hadn’t been bluffing when they announced a slate of “inmate accountability measures” the year before. Those measures included a 30-per-cent cut to the $6.90 or less inmates received for a day’s work. Added to existing deductions, their daily take home pay would now be $1.95 or less.
Most inmates had jobs maintaining the prison, doing work such as mopping floors and serving food. But Ottawa was also cutting the extra $2 an hour earned by inmates who had secured jobs with CORCAN, an agency of Correctional Services Canada (CSC) that offers a wide variety of products and services, 90 per cent of which are sold to federal departments, such as making office cubicles or welding material for tents for the Department of National Defence.
Shook, who was serving a sevenyear sentence for robbery and is now a 31-year-old criminology student at the University of Ottawa, said the prisoners reacted angrily. “It was a tense time,” he said. “Definitely not an easy time.”
Four years later, Shook awaits the results of a court challenge launched by inmates across the country about those pay cuts. Their lawyers argue prisoners should be paid at least the minimum wage of the province where they’re incarcerated, claiming the current pay rates are a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the United Nations’ international labour standards.
Meanwhile, critics on both the left and right have questions about whether the 37-year-old program should exist at all. CORCAN puts subsidized goods made with below-market labour costs in competition with the private sector, puts taxpayers on the hook for a government-run business venture that posts a loss most years and puts public safety at risk by releasing offenders into the community with limited resources to start a new life without returning to crime.
The inmates aren’t happy either. In affidavits submitted as part of the court case, they described measures taken by CSC staff to keep participation in CORCAN programs up following the pay cut.
Inmates said CSC staff told them that refusing to work for CORCAN could affect their chances of parole or getting transferred to a lower-security institution. One inmate, Claude Joly at Quebec’s Drummond penitentiary, included in his submission a letter from correctional staff threatening him with time in solitary confinement if he refused CORCAN work.
“People end up becoming essentially slaves, or exploited,” Shook said. “We’re not asking to become millionaires while we’re in prison, but we need this money.”
A spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said he was unable to comment on a matter before the courts. CSC also declined to make an official available for comment and spokesperson Sara Parkes said she was unable to comment on specific cases, but stated in an email that “simply refusing to go to work would not meet the test for a segregation placement.”
The Conservative party disagrees that prisoners being fed, clothed and sheltered by the state need paycheques as large as the ones they were getting. When then-public safety minister Vic Toews announced the elimination of hourly pay for CORCAN work and a 30 per cent cut to inmates’ remaining daily stipend in 2012, he framed the change as a deduction for room and board, rather than a pay cut.
“All too often, victims have told us they feel the criminals have all the rights. We’ve listened,” Toews said. “I am committed to ensuring that the safety and security of lawabiding Canadians comes first while criminals are held fully accountable for their actions.”
But Heidi Illingworth, executive director of the Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime, said lawabiding Canadians are best protected by ensuring offenders have sufficient resources when they re-enter the community.
“If they are employed on the inside and have some savings, they will be able to reintegrate more easily upon release. It is really about public safety,” Illingworth said in an email. “Certainly, victims of crime have serious financial challenges ... but we should not take from one to give to the other.”
In 1981, when inmate rates of pay were established, offenders were able to save significantly more for life on the outside than they can today. That’s because their wages — which haven’t increased since — had significantly more buying power.
The inmate pay rates were meant to reflect the amount of disposable income available to an average person working for the federal minimum wage at the time. They were also designed with the cost of a basket of goods a typical inmate would need to purchase in mind.
Inmates can use their earnings to buy treats such as pop and chocolate bars at the prison commissary, but those goods are often used as currency to barter for other things. Telephone calls, private visits with family and sending letters home all cost prisoners money.
In documents submitted as part of the court case, inmates described serious hardships imposed by the pay cut.
“I have to save six months to buy a pair of shoes,” said Christopher Cunningham, who was serving a 10-year sentence at the time for robbery at La Macaza Institution in Quebec.
“My mother is feeling much more pressure to provide for my children as I am no longer able to make the contributions I had been making previously,” said Michael Flannigan, an inmate at Collins Bay who lost his hourly pay for CORCAN work as a welder.
In 2013, after the cuts were officially enacted, inmates at prisons across the country went on strike. After requests to meet with the commissioner of corrections went unanswered, they retained lawyers and filed an application for a judicial review of the cuts the following year.
Conservative public safety critic Tony Clement said he stands behind the decision to cut prisoners’ pay.
“I think most Canadians, were they to be informed that inmates are taking the government of Canada to court, and therefore the taxpayers of Canada to court, because they are upset that their wages have been cut, would be appalled and astounded,” he said.
The total cost to taxpayers of Canada’s prison labour program is much larger than the inmates’ payroll, however. A thick stack of reports by auditors general, correctional investigators and parliamentary panels released during the course of two decades have all raised the same concerns: CORCAN is very expensive and not particularly effective.
CORCAN is a program with two mandates. Its goals are to operate like a for-profit business that makes as much money as possible, and to provide inmates with skills and work experience that will help them find jobs on the outside.
On the first count, CORCAN is unambiguously a dismal failure.
The agency has officially reported profits in about onethird of all fiscal years since 1993. But that calculation counts an annual payment from CSC, which is meant to offset the cost of providing training and supervision to inmates, as revenue.
That correctional training fee, which ranges from $15 million to $24 million annually, comes from CSC’s budget, making it a cost to taxpayers. And when CORCAN posts a loss, it covers it with money from a revolving fund, which taxpayers also ultimately fund.
The total public cost of CORCAN, including the training payment and annual losses, runs between $32 million and $51 million dollars a year, more than the CSC spends on inmate education ($21.2 million planned in 2015-16), violence prevention ($10 million) and substance abuse programs ($8.3 million).
Parkes, the CSC’s spokesperson, said CORCAN’s finances can’t be compared to a regular business.
“The Correctional and Training Fee is authorized by Treasury Board to offset the costs incurred by CORCAN that cannot be passed on to clients and that are related to our training mandate and correctional operating environment,” she said. “CORCAN has continued to refine its operational model, in particular during the last four years and will continue to review opportunities to increase revenues and ensure operations are efficient.”
Aaron Wudrick, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said he understands why CSC would want to try to recoup some of the costs of providing employment training. However, he said it’s not worth trying to break even if it interferes with the program’s rehabilitation goal, a problem that will only get worse if the inmates win their court challenge.
“It already costs more than is reasonable,” Wudrick said. “It would be better to shut the program down and use whatever money was in the program to assist prisoners with rehabilitation in other ways.”
A 1996 auditor general’s report sheds some light on why CORCAN can’t turn a profit despite the rock-bottom cost of inmate labour. The report found the pressure to employ as many prisoners for as many hours a day as possible led the agency to put offenders to work in high-cost, low-productivity industries with few job prospects on the outside, such as manufacturing and textiles.
Parkes said CORCAN updates its offerings to reflect labour market trends. As examples, she points to a new partnership with Habitat for Humanity and a construction program for Indigenous offenders in Alberta and Saskatchewan that’s under development.
But CORCAN risks blowback from the private sector if it competes too aggressively. If the agency gets picked for lucrative government contracts, other bidders sometimes complain.
In 2009, the procurement ombudsman conducted a review of the agency after receiving complaints about CORCAN construction contracts that allegedly involved conflicts of interest and sloppily applied procedures.
In particular, CORCAN awarded a one-year, $2.3-million contract to supply labour and inmate training to a business owned by a relative of the manager in charge of the agency’s construction operations.
The ombudsman determined that although the CORCAN manager had declared the conflict of interest up front, no one put controls in place to mitigate risks related to it.
In total, the procurement watchdog found three out of nine allegations were founded and determined the agency had fixed the problems with its procurement process in a followup review.
Another place where CORCAN runs into trouble when it acts too much like a profitmaximizing business is hiring. By definition, the offenders who would most benefit from the work are the ones with the least experience and the fewest skills — the opposite of what a hiring manager would be looking for in the private sector.
IT ALREADY COSTS MORE THAN IS REASONABLE. IT WOULD BE BETTER TO SHUT (IT) DOWN.
I ESSENTIALLY HAVE BEEN COERCED INTO CONTINUING TO CARRY OUT LABOUR FOR CORCAN.
Shook, the former inmate from Collins Bay, took a CORCAN job for a short period in 2010, cutting the hoods off prison-issued parkas after CSC deemed them a security risk. He said no one ever asked him if he had any interest in work in the textiles industry or tried to determine whether he would benefit from the experience before hiring him.
“I don’t draw a very clear connection between the work we were doing and something that’s marketable in the community,” he said.
Parkes said the CSC could not comment on an individual case, but noted the department assesses an offender’s employment needs when he or she enters the system.
CORCAN’s 2012-2013 annual report notes that it puts “a focus on training offenders with an identified need in the area of employment,” but only 10 per cent of the inmates working for the agency that year had employment needs rated as “high.”
More telling, however, is that a 2014 study by CSC found inmates who worked for CORCAN were just as likely to reoffend.
The study also found former CORCAN employees were nine per cent more likely to find work in the community than inmates who worked other institutional jobs, although female workers didn’t experience any gains.
The CORCAN jobs available to women, such as sewing underwear for male inmates, are even more likely to be in outdated industries with few job opportunities in Canada.
Correctional investigator Ivan Zinger said cutting inmate pay makes it even less likely that the offenders with the highest need for employment training will receive it through CORCAN.
If workers don’t have a monetary incentive to take a CORCAN position over a relatively easy institutional job such as pushing a broom, the only people who will choose it will be inmates at a low risk of reoffending who are looking for a way to occupy their time and keep a low profile, he said.
“Work and inmate pay are investments in better correctional outcomes,” Zinger said. “That translates into a safer society with lower recidivism rates and therefore lower victimization of the community.”
Documents from the inmates’ lawsuit support Zinger’s theory that CORCAN would have a harder time attracting workers without the hourly incentive pay. Multiple inmates allege CSC has resorted to explicit and implicit threats to keep participation in work programs high after the pay cuts.
Joly, the inmate who was told he had to choose between solitary confinement and working, said he eventually chose the latter. He held fast in his refusal to work for CORCAN, however, choosing an institutional position instead.
“I consider it slavery given the remuneration provided,” Joly wrote in French. “To avoid being isolated, I eventually accepted a job as a caregiver.”
Other inmates reported vaguer threats of the possibility that refusing work might affect their correctional plans, making it harder to get parole.
“I was quietly ‘warned’ by a high-ranking manager here at Collins Bay Medium that the warden would consider any decision to quit work because of pay cuts as going against my Correctional Plan and that charges may be levied against me,” wrote Flannigan, an inmate at Collins Bay. “So, essentially I have been coerced into continuing to carry out labour for CORCAN industries.”
Asked to confirm whether correctional staff have levied such threats, CSC spokesperson Parkes said she was unable to comment on affidavits.
As CORCAN’s challenges mount, experts in Canada’s correctional system say the program needs to be radically transformed to meet the needs of the 21st century labour market.
Mary Campbell, a retired director general of the corrections and criminal justice directorate at Public Safety Canada, said she spent a lot of amount of time trying to convince CORCAN to make significant changes that would improve inmate outcomes after release. However, inertia and poor leadership got in the way, she said.
“There is a view, and I would say quite predominant at the moment, that as long as you’re keeping the penitentiary quiet and you’re not getting the minister’s name on the front page — invariably in a bad way — then you’re running a successful operation,” she said. “There’s no crisis. There’s no big impetus.”
A judicial finding that inmates must be paid minimum wage would surely count as a big impetus, however. The impending decision may accomplish what two decades of hand-wringing from watchdogs and experts couldn’t.
“The bottom line on CORCAN is that it needs a complete rethink,” Campbell said. “It needs, probably, a different business model.”