Cory Morgan: Cut Bureaucracy, Target Repeat Offenders: Fixing Canada’s Crime and Corrections Strategy

Commentary

Few things infuriate the public more than seeing news stories of released chronic offenders carrying out serious crimes. When a known, dangerous criminal has been set free into the public only to commit a crime shortly afterward, it feels as if the system has failed.

Citizens, politicians, and police chiefs have been calling for bail and justice reform for years. The federal government tabled legislation in fall 2025 proposing a suite of justice reforms to crack down on crime. While the bill may have great intentions, it won’t be of much value unless the Canadian corrections system is reformed. Bureaucratic bloat has made Canada’s prison system overcrowded and unsustainably expensive.

A Correctional Service report found that there are 28 percent more employees in the correctional system than there are inmates. Of 19,084 employees in the correctional service, only 12,000 of them are front-line workers. The remaining 7,000 are bureaucrats. There is nearly one guard for every inmate, and one bureaucrat for every two inmates. It’s a ridiculously top-heavy system, and the cost to house an inmate is about $436 per day. If more inmates are to be incarcerated for longer periods, the budget must be increased greatly, or efficiencies must be sought.

Canada is recognizing that only a small percentage of criminals are committing most of the crimes. According to Justice Canada, 3–20 percent of the “police involved” population is responsible for 40–70 percent of crimes committed. It stands to reason that when these chronic offenders are identified, they should be given extended sentences to prevent further crimes. Some of the cases are extreme. Aiden David Tye has had 170 convictions, and many were for violent offences. Joseph Yaremko has over 114 convictions, including some for sexual assault. Martin James Weigelt has over 100 convictions, and even stole children’s cancer treatment wigs.

It’s time to accept that some prolific offenders are irredeemable and must be incarcerated indefinitely. When the convictions have surpassed triple digits, how can we release people like that back into the public in good conscience? How did we let it go so far?

A quarter of convicts released from the federal system will be convicted of a new offence within two years. Many of those 25 percent are prolific offenders who aren’t responding to efforts to reform them. Massive amounts of resources are poured into the prison system to provide programs for reforming prisoners. The best outcome in prison we could hope for is that an inmate is rehabilitated and becomes a safe and productive member of society. How effective are the programs, though, when resources are directed to chronic offenders as well as new ones? How much could we save if we changed the priorities of who qualifies for rehabilitative programs?

If we identify and segregate the untreatable offenders, we could keep them in facilities at a much lower cost than we currently do. The focus can be on security and activity, but not on reintegration into society. Yes, as harsh as it sounds, we will be writing them off. They need not be kept in inhumane conditions nor deprived of reasonable resources to maintain an acceptable standard of living, but we won’t try to give them post-secondary education, won’t dedicate much counselling to them, and certainly won’t offer day-release passes to try to bring them back into society. Facilities for these broken souls can be built and maintained for much less than it takes to keep them in a place where reform is the priority.

The savings through permanent segregation of chronic offenders could be dedicated to rehabilitating first- or second-time offenders. More program intensity directed at people early into a criminal life could be more effective in reforming them before they become habitual offenders. Separating the newer offenders from the chronic ones would offer social benefits as well and could reduce the chances of them sliding down the path of the hard-core types.

Not all offenders are equal, and in trying to treat them that way, we have created a system that fails both offenders and the public alike. We must target resources to where they can have the most impact, and that means drawing them away from where they are having the least.

Rethinking the mandate of Corrections Canada could lead to a more efficient system, though it would take strong political will. Criminal rights advocates would accuse the government of warehousing people and claim it is inhumane. Aren’t we warehousing them anyway? It’s just that we periodically let them out to harm people before putting them back behind bars for short sentences. This also puts more pressure on the already overburdened court system.

The solution is simple, yet tough. Canadians shouldn’t have to read stories of offenders assailing people after dozens or even over 100 prior offences. The government has expressed the will to crack down on sentencing and bail, but it must also show the will to change the prison system so we can afford to keep these dangerous people behind bars where they belong.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.