Number of prisoners awaiting trial continues to grow

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This article was published 31/10/2016 (3496 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s provincial adult prison population is rising quickly, largely due to a burgeoning inmate group awaiting trial.

Julie Frederickson, the province’s deputy minister of justice, told a legislative committee hearing Monday that the current count “under roof” stands at 2,555.

That’s a rise of 100 since June.

Frederickson said the increase is mainly due to rising numbers of prisoners on remand. She said the numbers of those serving out sentences is relatively stable. The department has said that 70 per cent of inmates in provincial jails are on remand.

Five prisoners in the Winnipeg Remand Centre have died in the past eight months, with officials refusing to offer details. Cells at the centre are crowded beyond their suggested capacity.

Under questioning from NDP justice critic Andrew Swan, Frederickson said the province is not hiring full-time corrections officers to deal with the additional workload, but her department is recruiting additional part-time staff.

She said the department is looking at several options for increasing the efficiency of the judicial process, but hiring more Crown attorneys isn’t one of them.

“Those considerations that we’re looking at don’t necessarily involve additional resources for Crown attorneys or for courts,” she told the committee. “Rather we’re looking at a cultural shift for the entire criminal justice system, from end to end…”

Swan, a former justice minister, said the NDP would support measures such as the increased use of restorative justice and expansion of drug and mental health courts to relieve the pressure on the system.

Meanwhile, he and Justice Minister Heather Stefanson squared off at the meeting over a proposed new provincial jail at Dauphin.

The new corrections facility is currently one of many capital projects, initiated by the NDP, that are now under review by the Pallister government.

The current Dauphin facility is a century old and a report several years ago said it was considered “beyond its structural usefulness,” the legislative committee was told.

Asked whether the project was moving forward, Stefanson said she did not want to “prejudice” the government’s review by saying one way or the other.

She told Swan it “was not correct” to say the project was not going forward.

“It could very well be that once that review is considered, that we’re moving forward,” the minister said.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca