CAEFS Response to the 2024-2025 Office of the Correctional Investigator Annual Report

OTTAWA, Ontario, Nov. 12, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS) welcomes the most recent report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator (OCI), which once again underscores the urgent need for change in Canada’s prison system—particularly for federally sentenced women, Indigenous people, and people with mental health considerations.

Despite decades of recommendations, the OCI report highlights that the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) has failed to implement necessary structural changes, and the Department of Public Safety puts little priority into addressing evidence of profound dysfunction in the operations of Canadian penitentiaries.

As CAEFS always underscores, the prison system is expensive, dysfunctional, and exhausted. It is a system that produces harm for those who encounter it. It is a system which responds to people overall—and especially Indigenous women, gender diverse people, and those with mental health needs—with punishment and security responses.

It is a system which systemically prioritizes punishment at the expense of not just people’s mental and physical health, but also at the expense of their connection to family, community, and vocational opportunity. Keeping people in harsh conditions far from their families and opportunity is costly for all Canadians, and certainly comes at the expense of the health, wellness and future possibilities of federally sentenced women and gender diverse people, who are already such a disadvantaged, vulnerable population.

The Correctional Investigator notes aptly:

“Canadians are not well served by a correctional system that is exceptionally costly and well-resourced by international standards, and continues to yield disappointing and uneven results, yet persistently fails to deliver on key correctional outcomes—particularly for Indigenous individuals.”

Especially since the pandemic, CAEFS has observed a rise of segregation-like practices, in addition to the persistent over-classification of Indigenous women and gender-diverse people, and the lack of use of community-based alternatives. In the final report authored by outgoing OCI Dr. Ivan Zinger, a core failure of Canadian penitentiaries designated for women is captured: the systemic disregard of the prevalence of victimization and trauma among federally sentenced women and gender diverse people.

The reports findings emphasize what CAEFS and our member societies have long called attention to. Federally sentenced women enter federal custody with lives characterized by trauma and victimization, and this is especially true for Indigenous women. Once incarcerated, time in prisons, overall, worsens people’s wellbeing.

“Incarceration itself, notes Zinger “can be a traumatic experience. Many women told my Office that the prison environment—hostile, often violent, and marked by a lack of autonomy—has worsened their mental health, retriggered past traumas, or resulted in new traumatic experiences. Some described feeling constantly on edge or emotionally fatigued. Routine institutional practices, including strip searches, cell searches, institutional counts, lockdowns, and recounting one’s story to new staff were consistently identified as triggering. Women said these practices often lead to trauma-related behaviours such as aggression, withdrawal, and impulsivity. These behaviours are rarely understood as trauma responses and are often met with security-based responses like the use of force, loss of privileges, or, in some instances, placement in the Structured Intervention Unit (SIU)”

CAEFS calls on upon the Government of Canada to act decisively on the OCI’s recommendations, and to:

• Invest immediately in organizations that support people in prison and upon release, and invest in the Federal Framework to Reduce Recidivism.
• Convene a renewed task force on federally sentenced women and gender diverse people, to systemically address and implement reforms that prioritize healing and reintegration over punishment.
• Expand practices which support community-based alternatives to incarceration, particularly Indigenous-led and culturally grounded supports.
• Redirect resources away from costly institutional responses toward community supports that reduce recidivism and strengthen public safety.

Finally, CAEFS applauds the OCI for emphasizing that the Canadian prison system is a system resistant to change, despite a clear and urgent need for change. Zinger rightly highlights that litigation, human rights claims, and class actions should not be the primary drivers of change in Canadian prisons. As the OCI rightly observes, these costs—financial, social, and human—could be easily avoided if longstanding issues were addressed proactively, and if the longstanding recommendations of the OCI, CAEFS, and a host of other organizations, inquests, commissions and beyond, were acted upon.

Media Contact Emilie Coyle – ecoyle@caefs.ca 613-316-6785

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