EXCLUSIVE: Prisons full of foreign inmates with no known origin

Ottawa has lost track of over a third of foreign criminals in Canada, as the number of non-Canadian inmates reported by the Correctional Service of Canada hits a record high.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ottawa has seemingly lost track of nationality details for a third of foreign prisoners in Canada, as the number of non-Canadian inmates reported by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) hits a record high, increasing by 31% since 2015.

The figures, obtained by Conservative MP Blaine Calkins in a written parliamentary question, show the Correctional Service of Canada is unaware of the citizenship of 319 foreign offenders or 37% of the total, despite spending $126 million last year to house them.

Calkin’s questions are intriguing: how many foreign nationals are in Canada’s federal lockups? Where did they come from? What crimes got them committed? And at what cost?

The figures, covering 2015-2016 to the current 2024-2025 fiscal year, show non-Canadian inmates now represent nearly 6 per cent of the total federal prison population, up from 4.5 per cent a decade ago.

The government response claims the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) cannot provide a specific cost breakdown for housing non-Canadian inmates because it does not distinguish costs by citizenship status.

It did, however, include average annual costs per inmate across all federal offenders, which have ballooned 34 per cent from $116,500 in 2016-2017 to $156,700 in 2023-2024, with figures for the current fiscal year still pending.

According to the latest figures from Statistics Canada, the average Canadian’s annual income is around $59,900. This means keeping a single non-Canadian inmate behind federal bars now costs taxpayers more than two years’ worth of their before-tax income.

To put it into a different context, using these averages to estimate the burden for non-Canadians alone, taxpayers shelled out approximately $126 million last fiscal year.

By offence type, the vast majority of incarcerated non-Canadian offenders, 479, are serving time for Schedule I violent and sexual crimes, followed by 157 for second-degree murder and 91 for serious drug offences.

Security classifications show 479 at medium level, 154 at minimum, 114 at maximum, and 110 “yet to be determined.”

The country of citizenship data lists Jamaica, India, and the United States as leading origins at 63, 44 and 38, respectively, but a staggering 319 are marked as “unknown.”

True North reached out to Correctional Service Canada to get a better understanding of how this data gap could exist, asking whether the classification is due to incomplete intake records, self-reported information not being provided, privacy protections under the Privacy Act, or other operational factors.

CSC did not respond by deadline.