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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Correctional Investigator notes aptly:

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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“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)”