Cost of maintaining provincial jails rising
REGINA The cost of justice continues to rise in Saskatchewan, with the province currently spending more money on incarceration than it expected to when the budget was released in April.
Units have been closed for maintenance at Saskatchewan jails, prompting the need for an additional $1.5 million.
A total of 119 beds have been lost due to closures at the Regina Correctional Centre and the Saskatoon Correctional Centre.
The maintenance has partially prompted the need for more staffing to monitor inmates, according to provincial officials. They say 143 new full-time positions are required, 76 of which were already filled by mid-november.
At the same time, there are more inmates at most of Saskatchewan’s jails, with the province reaching record levels of people in jail this year.
Point-in-time counts show there were 186 inmates at the Pine Grove Correctional Centre, up from 175 last year. At the Prince Albert Correctional Centre, there were 479 when the count was taken this year, compared to 451 last year. Saskatoon’s Correctional Centre went from 448 to 469 inmates. The White Birch Remand Unit had 15.4 this year, compared to 12 last year and the Regina Correctional Centre stayed the same, with 677 inmates.
Roughly 50 per cent of those inmates are on remand. The province has been criticized for not reducing its remand numbers, but according to provincial officials, its efforts to improve are “trending positively.”
“Bail and remand (numbers need) to slow down, so we need to slow down intake,” Dale Mcfee told a committee earlier this month. Mcfee had served as the province’s deputy minister of corrections and policing before being named Edmonton’s chief of police.
“There’s a release program making sure that the folks getting out within that week, the last week of getting out, that we’re actually programming them into the community so we ... You know, obviously the goal is to not come back — hopefully, ideally.”
He said the third step is to assess what dollars are needed to convert space back and forth between recreational space and holding spaces, depending on how many inmates are populating a jail at any given time, noting the “ultimate goal of where we’re trying to go is to … jail the people that we’re afraid of and not the ones we’re mad at. In other words, we need to make sure that we’re getting the right people into the right places at the right time.”
Mcfee added there has also been a “significant delay” in recruiting Crown prosecutors, which would speed up the court system and further alleviate remand numbers.
Corrections and policing needing more money than expected to deal with higher-than-expected inmate population counts has become a near-annual event in Saskatchewan. Last year, an additional $12 million in funding was needed.
Much of that money — $7.3 million — was due to the increased number of inmates in the province’s jails, resulting in the need for more spaces typically used for classrooms.
Bail and remand (numbers need) to slow down, so we need to slow down intake.