Following the money: who profits from Canada’s prisons?
One of the ways that Canadian Friends Service Committee (CFSC) contributes to social change is through researched reports that shine light on issues of injustice. In December, we published Following the money: cui bono report. It’s an analysis of who benefits financially from Canadian federal carceral institutions. I want to tell you about the report, and about the surprising experience of writing it.
Part one: words a researcher does not want to hear
“Karen, your figures are out. They’re out by a lot. About $1.5 billion.”
$1.5 billion? Billion?! So began my conversation with Neil Telles-Langdon, a fellow researcher. It was about a week before the deadline to publish the Cui bono report, and just 10 days before my co-author Lindsay Hunt and I were set to present our findings at the National Restorative Justice Symposium. To say that I was horrified is beyond an understatement.
My colleague Lindsay is meticulous. And we’d checked and re-checked our data many times. It was only out of a commitment to make absolutely sure that our numbers were accurate that I’d enlisted an outside researcher to go over the data one last time. And he said our figures were way off. Instead of Correctional Services spending $3.6+ billion on outsourced contracts in 2024, the number was closer to $2 billion.
“The carceral system doesn’t rehabilitate, it doesn’t make us safer, and it enriches private corporations.”
How could this be? We were using figures that are publicly available on the Open Government website. Open Government is set up for transparency. It shows how the government spends taxpayer dollars. Our methodology was simple, and solid. How could we have gone so wrong?
The three of us met to get to the bottom of this. Neil ran the figures again, to show us what he’d found… and he came up with a very different result.
What?! He ran them again: different figures. Lindsay ran them: different again. We enlisted the help of CFSC’s Sandra Wiens. Another different outcome. We now had seven different figures, sometimes within minutes.
In short, the problem was not us, or our research. The problem was that, while promising transparency, the Open Government website actually gives wildly varying numbers.
Where is the accountability? Repeated efforts via phone and email to find someone in government who could provide an explanation came up empty-handed. Unfortunately, it seems that “Open Government” might more accurately be called “Misleading Government.”
Moreover, if we hadn’t caught this problem, someone might, in the future, have pointed out that our data was incorrect and used that to invalidate our conclusions, without realizing that it was the government dataset that’s the issue, not the research.
Fortunately, Lindsay had saved our original dataset, and we could go ahead with publishing our findings. You can access the full report at https://QuakerService.ca/CuiBonoReport (now including an appendix addressing the issue of a lack of government transparency in spending).
Part two: the findings
In a capitalist society, many decisions are driven by the goal of increasing profit margins. Although in Canada the carceral system is a public one (unlike in the United States, where some prisons are privatized), many of the services that our prisons and jails rely on have been privatized.
The goal of CFSC’s transformative justice work is to enact the Quaker commitment to penal and prison abolition by “moving the needle” nationally towards transformative justice. At CFSC we’re aware that we need a range of approaches to reach people. We try to keep in mind common human values identified by Shalom Schwartz. Consequently, one argument that we decided might reach people who are less convinced by humanitarian ideals is to critique the carceral system through a lens of fiscal responsibility. We decided to research and analyze cui bono or who benefits (financially) from incarcerating people in Canada.
To do this, we looked for data on government expenditures. Provincial data is not readily available, so we focused on federal contracts. The federal government is required to publish the names of recipients, and the amounts of money paid out in contracts over $10,000. (This is the data that’s supposed to be available on the Open Canada website.)
Our research shows big international corporations benefitting from these contracts. One of the largest recipients is McKesson Corporation—a U.S.-based company that provides prisons with medical equipment and pharmaceuticals. The $215 million-worth that Correctional Services Canada receives is concerning.
Firstly, McKesson is the subject of various lawsuits for its role in the opioid epidemic. Secondly, there is significant evidence of people being overmedicated while behind bars (to keep them docile), a practice that can lead people to develop addictions while inside.
(Watch an eye-opening four-minute video from our series Unshackled: wisdom from a formerly incarcerated woman where Lisa talks about overmedication in prisons:)
And of course, being a foreign corporation means that the profits McKesson makes are taken outside of the country, plus the corporation is unlikely to have much stake in any improvements to the justice system, or any real concern about the wellbeing of people incarcerated, or the society they will return to.
Another beneficiary of Canadian government largesse is the Bird construction company. While Bird is at least Canadian, their knowledge and expertise could be put to better use than building prisons. Additionally, the construction of carceral spaces relies heavily on concrete, which is environmentally problematic and contributes to global warming through the production of carbon dioxide.
McKesson and Bird are just two of the corporations that benefit from government spending—to the detriment of community wellbeing and transformative change. We invite you to read the whole report, where you will also learn about prison food systems, the lack of oversight of the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires, and the price-gouging that incarcerated people and their families experience when trying to use phones and technology.
While Quakers might argue that the current carceral system disrespects the Inner Light of people caught up in it, it is also clear that the current system is an expensive, ineffective waste of taxpayer dollars. The system doesn’t rehabilitate, it doesn’t make us safer, and it enriches private corporations.
Karen Ridd is CFSC’s Transformative Justice Program Coordinator.
