"Tougher on Crime" Doesn't Stop Crime. It Never Has.

All references cited in this article are part of the public record. The assertions and conclusions presented, unless otherwise noted, have not been legally contested. Characterizations identified as the author's view are opinion.

In May 2026, the Ontario government announced it would add 2,500 permanent jail beds over the next decade at a cost of $3 billion, reopening closed facilities, building new ones and hiring more than 700 correctional staff. The goal, the province said, was to keep pace with tougher bail and sentencing laws.¹ Solicitor General Michael Kerzner put the philosophy plainly: "When violent and repeat offenders break the law, Ontarians expect them to be kept behind bars and not back on our streets."¹ In March, announcing new beds in Eastern Ontario, he promised the province would "always have room to keep offenders behind bars and off our streets."²

It is a message that sounds strong. It polls well. And it rests on an idea that decades of research, including research paid for by the Government of Canada, have found to be false: That the threat of more and longer punishment stops crime.

What the Evidence Says About Deterrence

The U.S. Department of Justice's own research arm, the National Institute of Justice, summarizes the science in five points. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment. Prison sentences are unlikely to deter future crime. Police deter crime when they increase the perception that offenders will be caught. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime, in part because offenders know little about the sanctions for specific crimes. And there is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.³

Canada's own government reached the same conclusion two decades ago. In 2002, a study for the Solicitor General of Canada pooled 117 studies covering more than 442,000 offenders. It found that harsher sanctions had no deterrent effect on reoffending. Prison, compared with community sanctions, was associated with a slight increase in reoffending, and sentences of more than two years were associated with an average increase of 7 per cent.⁴ Locking people up for longer did not make them less likely to commit crimes when they got out. If anything, it made them slightly more likely.

Not Even Life in Prison, or Death

If the threat of punishment stopped crime, the harshest punishments would stop the most serious crimes. They do not.

Murder in Canada already carries an automatic sentence of life imprisonment. People still commit it. Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976. Opponents warned that murders would rise. Instead, the homicide rate, which stood at 3.03 per 100,000 people in 1975, the year before abolition, had fallen to about 1.91 by 2024.⁵ In the United States, states with the death penalty have consistently had higher murder rates than states without it: In 2020, 7.3 per 100,000 compared with 4.7.⁶ The U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that research on capital punishment "is uninformative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates."³

If the gallows and a life sentence cannot deter murder, a few more months in an Ontario jail will not deter a break-in.

Who Is Actually in Ontario's Jails

Ontario's jails are already full. In the first half of 2025, they held an average of about 10,800 people in space built for about 8,500, and some institutions have run at 150 per cent of capacity.⁷ And most of the people inside have not been convicted of anything. As of April 1, 2026, about 81 per cent of Ontario's jail population was on remand, awaiting trial.⁷ In the early 1980s, the figure was about 20 per cent.⁷

Jail is also expensive. Ontario's Auditor General found it cost $302 a day to hold one person in a provincial jail in 2018-19, nearly double the cost a decade earlier.⁸ That is more than $110,000 a year per person, before counting the new construction. The province's $3 billion for 2,500 beds works out to about $1.2 million in capital cost per bed.

And jail does not fix what put people there. Of Ontarians released from provincial jail after sentences of six months or more in 2015-16, 37 per cent were convicted of a new crime within two years.⁹ Across five provinces, Statistics Canada found about 70 per cent of people released from provincial custody were reconvicted within five years, compared with about 45 per cent of those who started a community sentence.¹⁰ Part of that gap reflects who gets sent to jail in the first place, but it is hardly the record of a system that works. Meanwhile, violence inside Ontario's jails is rising.¹¹

The Gold Standard Already Exists

The world does not need to guess what works. The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the Nelson Mandela Rules and adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015, set out the purpose of prison in their fourth rule: To protect society against crime and to reduce reoffending. "Those purposes can be achieved only if the period of imprisonment is used to ensure, so far as possible, the reintegration of such persons into society upon release so that they can lead a law-abiding and self-supporting life."¹² The UN Office on Drugs and Crime's handbook on preventing recidivism lays out how: Education, work training, treatment for addiction and mental illness, preparation for release, and support after it.¹³

The World Health Organization treats violence as a public health problem that can be prevented the way disease is: By identifying its causes and risk factors, testing interventions, and scaling up what works. It treats prison health as part of public health, and calls for evidence-based mental health and addiction care inside prisons.¹⁴ Neither organization's model begins with more cells. Both begin with what happens to a person inside them, and after.

What Norway Did

Norway is the clearest proof. In the 1990s, after decades of high reoffending, it rebuilt its prisons around rehabilitation and what it calls the principle of normality: Life inside should resemble life outside as closely as possible, so that people leave ready to live it.¹⁵ Prisoners work, study and receive treatment, and preparation for release begins on the first day.

The results are among the best in the world. In a joint study by the Nordic correctional services, which used a common definition of reoffending, only 20 per cent of people released from Norwegian prisons received a new sentence within two years.¹⁶ Norway does this while imprisoning far fewer people: About 60 per 100,000, compared with about 105 in Canada.¹⁷ Recidivism is measured differently from one country to the next, so comparisons are never exact. But Ontario's 37 per cent two-year reconviction rate and Norway's 20 per cent are not in the same league.

The Honest Part: Sweden and Finland

Sweden and Finland are often grouped with Norway, and they share its lower incarceration rates and rehabilitative philosophy. But the same Nordic study found higher reoffending among released prisoners there: 36 per cent in Finland and 43 per cent in Sweden. The study's author cautioned that these national differences mostly reflect who each country sends to prison in the first place. Norway, for example, jailed large numbers of low-risk drunk drivers, while Sweden diverted most of its low-risk offenders to probation, leaving its prisons with a higher-risk population.¹⁶

Sweden is also now living through a wave of gang violence, and it has turned toward exactly the approach Ontario favours. In August 2026, it began allowing courts to double sentences for gang-related crimes. Its prisons are so overcrowded it is renting 400 cells in Estonia.¹⁸ Whether that will reduce gang violence remains to be seen. What it has already done is fill the prisons.

There is a deeper problem with jailing gang members, whether for months or decades: It does not remove them from the gang. In my view, gangs run on loyalty, sometimes enforced by death, and that loyalty does not end at the prison gate. It continues inside, and it continues after release until the next offence. Canada's own prisons show how this works. Correctional Service Canada has reported that gangs "aggressively recruit" inside federal penitentiaries, and the number of known gang members in federal custody rose 44 per cent in five years, driven partly by recruitment behind bars.¹⁹ By 2018, more than 2,300 federal inmates belonged to what the service calls "security threat groups."²⁰ Sweden, for its part, has planned to nearly triple its prison capacity, from about 9,000 places to 27,000,²¹ and many of the attacks there are ordered by gang leaders based abroad, out of reach of any Swedish sentence.²² A longer sentence for a teenager hired to pull a trigger does nothing to the person who hired them.

What works is stopping young people from joining in the first place, and giving those already in a way out. That means programs, not cells. Sweden's own best result came from exactly that. In Malmö, police, the city and the correctional service launched Sluta skjut (Stop Shooting) in 2018, a group violence intervention that pairs a clear message from police with real offers of help to leave the gang. The national crime prevention council's evaluation found shootings fell by about 25 per cent per month during the pilot, though it cautioned the results are not fully conclusive.²³ In Scotland, the Violence Reduction Unit has treated violence as a preventable disease since 2005, with youth programs in schools and communities. Scotland's homicides fell from 137 in 2004-05 to 59 in 2017-18, and hospital admissions in Glasgow for assaults with sharp objects fell by 62 per cent over a decade.²⁴ Here at home, two projects funded by Canada's federal Youth Gang Prevention Fund saw about three-quarters of their participants, 81 young people, leave their gangs.²⁵

The lesson is not that the Nordic model is magic. It is that the countries that apply rehabilitation most consistently get the best results, and that even in Scandinavia, a turn toward "tough on crime" brings the same immediate result it brings everywhere else: More prisoners, more cost, and no proof yet of less crime.

Looking Tough Is Not the Same as Being Effective

In my view, Doug Ford's government is confusing Ontarians under a conservative article of faith: That punishment works. It does not. What punishment does is look like action. A new jail can be announced, funded and shown on the news. A premier can promise to livestream bail hearings, as Ford did in March.² None of it requires showing that crime actually goes down.

The government's own plans give the game away. Internal documents obtained by Global News in April show the province planning jail expansion in three phases: About 1,170 new beds by 2032 at a cost of roughly $4 billion, another 1,500 between 2033 and 2041, and 2,000 to 3,000 more between 2040 and 2050. The plans even include adding a third bunk to cells built for two. University of Ottawa criminologist Justin Piché called triple bunking "a recipe for increased tension and violence."²⁶ A government that believed its approach would reduce crime would not be planning for a quarter century of more prisoners.

Meanwhile, the money flows to concrete. The new Thunder Bay Correctional Complex alone is a $1.2 billion contract for 345 beds, about $3.5 million per bed.²⁷ Billions are going to construction contracts and cells, while the courts, treatment and reintegration programs that would actually reduce crime get a fraction. Ontarians are paying for the appearance of safety, not safety itself.

Who profits? Ontario's jails are still publicly owned and run by provincial staff. But the new ones are being built as public-private partnerships. Thunder Bay's is a "design, build, finance and maintain" contract: EllisDon finances, builds and maintains the complex and is paid by the province through performance-based payments over a 30-year term.²⁸ Every new jail built this way is decades of guaranteed revenue for a private consortium, whether or not it does anything to reduce crime. Ontario has also tried going further. From 2001 to 2006, the Central North Correctional Centre in Penetanguishene was run by a U.S. company, Management and Training Corporation. When the province compared it with a similar publicly run jail, the public jail performed better on security, health care and reducing reoffending, and Ontario took it back, ending Canada's only privately run adult prison.²⁹ Ontarians have already paid once to learn that profit and public safety do not mix well. They should watch closely to make sure they are not asked to pay for that lesson twice.

Readers can judge this government's broader record with public money in this site's article on the Doug Ford record.

Crime Has Causes. Ontario Is Making Them Worse.

The most effective way to reduce crime is to reduce the conditions that produce it. On two of the biggest, education and housing, the province has been moving in the wrong direction.

Education. The province's own Financial Accountability Office found that real, inflation-adjusted provincial operating funding per student fell to $14,504 in 2024-25, the lowest level in a decade, and projects it will fall further, to $14,111, by 2027-28.³⁰ The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives calculates that core funding has dropped by about $1,500 per student since 2018.³¹ That matters for crime. In a landmark study using changes in compulsory schooling laws, economists Lance Lochner and Enrico Moretti found that education significantly reduces arrests and incarceration, with the largest effect coming from finishing high school. A 10 percentage point increase in graduation rates reduced arrest rates by about 7 per cent, with the biggest effects on murder, assault and motor vehicle theft.³² Money cut from classrooms tends to come back later as a bigger bill for police, courts and jails.

Housing. Ontario does not set inflation or interest rates; those are driven by national and global forces and the Bank of Canada. But housing is where provincial policy bites, and in 2018 the Ford government exempted every rental unit first occupied after November 15, 2018 from rent control, allowing landlords of newer units to raise rents by any amount each year.³³ The results show up on the street. The Association of Municipalities of Ontario found that nearly 85,000 Ontarians experienced homelessness in 2025, up 50 per cent since 2021, with the fastest growth in rural and northern communities. Without significant intervention, AMO warns, homelessness could double by 2035, and reach nearly 300,000 people in an economic downturn.³⁴ People without stable housing, income or schooling are exactly the people who cycle through Ontario's jails. Building cells for them after the fact is the most expensive response possible.

A fair word about newcomers. Ukrainians fleeing Russia's invasion added to housing demand, and that is an acceptable reason for some of the pressure. It is not their fault that Russia attacked their country, and they had every right to seek a safe haven. But how they were distributed across Canada was not well planned. Under the emergency travel program, nearly 300,000 Ukrainians came to Canada, with no cap on numbers.³⁵ Unlike resettled refugees, they were not directed to any particular city or province, and the federal government's own evaluation found that provinces "were unable to predict and plan for arrivals." More than half of those surveyed settled in Ontario or Alberta, most of all in the Greater Toronto Area, where housing was already the most expensive.³⁶ By available estimates, about a third came to Ontario, roughly in line with or slightly below the province's share of Canada's population.³⁵ Their numbers were also small next to other growth: In a single year, 2022-23, Ontario's population of international students and temporary workers rose by 305,000.³⁷ In my view, an expensive housing market like Toronto's should have received fewer families, with more steered toward communities that had room for them. Welcoming people in need and planning where they will live are not opposing goals. Both are the job.

In my view, the answer is to improve and reduce the causes: Fund schools so that young people finish them. Protect tenants and build housing people can afford. Treat addiction and mental illness before they become criminal records. These are not soft alternatives to fighting crime. They are how crime is actually reduced.

Fixing the System Instead

In my view, Ontario and Canada trying to "play tough" is a waste of tax dollars. The money would do far more if it were spent fixing the system the way the evidence says works:

Fix the courts. If anything, Ontario needs more courts, more judges and more prosecutors, not more jails. When four in five people in jail have not been convicted, the overcrowding is a court backlog problem, not a sentencing problem. The backlog is also letting accused people walk free without a trial. Since 2016, the Supreme Court's Jordan decision has required most criminal trials to finish within 18 months in provincial court and 30 months in superior court. In 2023-24, about 9,560 cases across Canada were stayed or withdrawn after blowing past those limits.³⁸ In Ontario, more than 580 cases were stayed for delay between 2016 and the end of 2023, including 145 sexual assault cases.³⁹ Chief Justice Richard Wagner has been blunt that governments must provide the judges and court resources to meet the deadlines: "Jordan is the law."³⁸ In 2024, Ontario committed $29 million to appoint 25 judges and hire 190 Crown prosecutors, victim support and court staff.⁴⁰ Its new jail plan is $3 billion. A case thrown out for delay keeps no one safe, no matter how many empty cells are waiting.

Clear the backlog now, while the courts are built. New courthouses, judges and prosecutors take years. In my view, the backlog can be cut much sooner by triaging cases strategically. None of this requires inventing anything new. Every tool below already exists in Canadian law. The problem is that we are not using them nearly as efficiently as we could:

First, review the oldest remand cases first. Ontario's Crown Prosecution Manual already requires prosecutors to drop any charge with no reasonable prospect of conviction, at every stage of a case.⁴¹ Where the evidence is weak, the charge should be withdrawn, not bargained down: Pressuring a jailed person with a weak case to plead guilty is exactly how innocent people end up with records. Of 83 proven wrongful convictions in the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions, 15 were guilty pleas.⁴² We must protect the innocent, even if it means some of the guilty walk free. It is a principle as old as modern law: In the 1760s, the English jurist William Blackstone wrote that it is "better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer."⁴³ Where the evidence is strong, offer a resolution that trades further jail time for a guilty plea and a lengthy period of supervised probation.

Next, move the most minor offences up, starting with first-time offenders, many of whom are already frightened by the experience and are among the least likely to reoffend. Ontario's Direct Accountability Program already lets adults charged with minor offences repair the harm, through restitution, community service or counselling, and have the charges withdrawn with no criminal record.⁴⁴ It should be used far more widely. For those who need more than diversion, the Criminal Code already allows a suspended sentence with probation, and if the person commits a new crime, the court can revoke it and sentence them for the original offence on top of the new one.⁴⁵ That is a powerful incentive to stay out of trouble. Probation is currently capped at three years; Parliament could lengthen it for these cases if it chose to.⁴⁵

Finally, make the resolution mean something. Courts can attach "reasonable conditions" to probation that help a person reintegrate, such as finding and keeping work, can require up to 240 hours of community service, and can order restitution to victims, so that someone who stole $5,000 pays it back from a paycheque instead of costing taxpayers more than $300 a day in a cell.⁴⁶ Every low-risk case resolved this way frees a courtroom, a prosecutor and a jail bed for the serious cases that need them.

Make getting caught more certain. The research is clear that certainty deters and severity does not. Policing focused on solving crimes and being present where crime happens does more than longer sentences ever will.³

Treat what drives crime. Addiction, mental illness, homelessness and lack of education and work are the common threads in Ontario's jails. Treat them inside, and support people when they leave.

Use community sentences for low-risk offenders. They cost a fraction of jail and, by Canada's own research, do not increase reoffending the way prison does.⁴

Back the employers who give people a second chance. A job is one of the strongest protections against reoffending. A Correctional Service of Canada study of more than 1,700 federal offenders found that those without stable employment after release were 3.6 times more likely to return to custody, and 2.5 times more likely to return with a new offence.⁴⁷ But more than a million Ontarians have a criminal record, and 15 per cent of employers surveyed refuse to hire anyone with one, no matter how minor the offence or how long ago it was.⁴⁸ Canada and its provinces could remove that risk for employers with a bonding program. The United States has had one since 1966: The federal government gives employers a free insurance bond, usually $5,000 and up to $25,000, covering theft or other dishonesty by a newly hired person with a record during their first six months on the job. It has backed more than 52,000 job placements.⁴⁹ A policy paper published by the University of Toronto's Ontario 360 project and Cardus has already recommended Ontario create its own, noting the U.S. program reports that only about 1 per cent of bonds result in a claim.⁴⁸ For people whose crimes were minor, a bond costs the public very little. A return to jail costs more than $300 a day.

Prepare every prisoner for release. Almost everyone who goes to jail comes back out. The only question is who they will be when they do.

Being "tough on crime" is a slogan. Being effective on crime is a policy. Ontario is about to spend $3 billion on the slogan. The gold standard is already written, tested and proven. All it takes is the will to apply it.