NWT could bar Nunavut inmates from its jails

Lockers in the art room at North Slave Correctional Centre in Yellowknife, decorated with drawings by inmates. The Yellowknife jail, which opened in 2004, has been home to as many as 30 to 45 Nunavummiut at any one time time. (FILE PHOTO)

Because of pressures created by the federal government’s Bill C-10, the Government of the Northwest Territories will likely stop accomodating Nunavut inmates doing territorial time within NWT jails, Glen Abernethy, the NWT justice minister, said May 31.

“[O]ur first step would be to stop taking Nunavut inmates, which would leave us room for northern [sic] inmates,” Abernethy said in the NWT legislative assembly in response to a question from Alfred Moses, the MLA for Inuvik Boot Lake.

Bill C-10, the Conservative government’s Safe Streets and Communities Act, creates mandatory minimum jail sentences for certain sex and drug offences and eliminates conditional sentencing, also known as house arrest, for various offences.

No one has calculated exactly how many extra correctional centre spaces Nunavut will need after the bill comes into force later this year.

But in the NWT, the territory’s justice department produced a report, tabled May 29 in the NWT legislature, that attempts to measure how many more inmates Bill C-10 will produce for them and how much extra it will cost.

That report found the NWT must find room for the equivalent of only 11 extra inmates, at an extra cost totalling only $53,500 for all 11 of them.

But with the NWT’s prison population growing by about five per cent a year, the territory might also have to spend big money on the construction of new correctional centre spaces sooner than expected, the report said.

Even without Bill C-10, the number of people doing territorial time rose from 173 in 2004-5 to 253 in 2010-11, then fell to 232 in 2011-12.

Bill C-10 will mean, however, that available correctional centre spaces in the NWT will get used up at a quicker rate in the future.

“Based on current admissions, if an additional 11 offenders were admitted to custody in the first year after the implementation of Bill C-10, and admissions continue to grow by 5%, we would quickly exceed capacity,” the NWT report said.

Creating new space could cost big capital dollars, the report found.

For example, adding a new pod to the North Slave Correctional Centre in Yellowknife could cost $32 million. A new women’s correctional centre could cost $35 million.

Abernethy said Nunavut and federal inmates doing time in NWT correctional centres would be the first to go if the NWT started running out of space.

Right now, Nunavut pays the NWT $266.74 per day for each Nunavut offender, and Ottawa pays the NWT $325 a day for each federal offender.

Dan Shewchuk, the Nunavut justice minister said June 1 in the Nunavut legislature that Nunavut’s contract with the NWT is for 20 correctional centre spaces.

Right now, Nunavut’s only big jail, the Baffin Correctional Centre in Iqaluit, sometimes holds more than 100 inmates, even though BCC was first built to accommodate only 48.

A new jail set to open in Rankin Inlet this fall would create an extra 46 beds and a temporary structure to be erected across from BCC in Iqaluit would house more Nunavut inmates.

Bill C-10 received royal assent this past March 13 and will likely come into force this October or November.