No more reduced sentences due to COVID-19 and house confinements. After reaching their biggest low in 10 years, prisons are gradually seeing the return of people who received lighter sentences and who, during COVID-19, had enjoyed exceptional leniency.
Posted at 4:36 p.m.
According to figures obtained by The Pressthe average population of inmates in Quebec prisons was only 3,618 in 2020-2021, while it was 4,487 in 2018-2019 and rose to 5,177 in 2014-2015.
Several factors explain this decline. Courthouses in particular have been idling for months. The authorities have also consciously sought to reduce as much as possible the population in prisons, environments particularly conducive to outbreaks.
The exceptions granted in recent years were strictly related to COVID-19 and the priority is to return to the usual system which works very well, indicated to The Press Louis-Julien Dufresne, press officer for Geneviève Guilbault, Minister of Public Security.
Mathieu Lavoie, president of the Union of Peace Officers in Correctional Services of Quebec (SAPSCQ-CSN) notes that the movements have already resumed. “In Bordeaux, for example, about a month ago, we had 200 entries and last weekend, we had 130,” he notes.
Who are these people who suddenly find their way back to prison? Mainly people who have received intermittent sentences to serve on weekends, as judges commonly authorize when they have been convinced that the defendant would otherwise risk losing their job.
We are talking about simple assault, shoplifting, etc., explains Mand Jean-Claude Hébert, criminal lawyer. Each prison director has a certain discretionary power under which he can allow people who have been sentenced “to stay their sentence” under certain conditions, continues Ms.and Hebert.
Prison directors have therefore acted to limit their prison population, judges and lawyers too.
In court, COVID-19 has regularly been invoked by defense lawyers to prevent defendants from ending up in establishments at critical times during the pandemic, notes Ms.and Charles Côté, also a criminal lawyer.
Sentences have been reduced, community work has often been preferred to detention, he observes, noting for example that one of his clients was confined to residence for a good part of his sentence (while Quebec was himself quite stuck at home!)
“We tried to be imaginative, we found alternative solutions to imprisonment, but there, the old reflexes take over,” notes Ms.and Side with regret.
Stable population in federal penitentiaries
In federal penitentiaries, the number of inmates “has been around 14,000 in recent years,” says Ms.and Ivan Zinger, Correctional Investigator of Canada.
With the 12,338 inmates they currently have, we are not that far from the usual count.
While provincial prisons are so crowded that inmates must regularly be transferred from one prison to another – and often in a region quite far from theirs, recalls Mathieu Lavoie, the president of the peace officers – federal penitentiaries , they have a large number of empty cells.