Canada’s prisons are ‘stifling’ access to online education

One of the best predictors of a prisoner’s likelihood to reoffend following their release is if they try to educate themselves behind bars.

Getting any education while incarcerated reduces recidivism by 20 to 30 per cent, according to federal government research. The rate is even higher — up to 75 per cent — for prisoners who take post-secondary courses. Officials in Ottawa have said successful reintegration into the community requires at least some education beyond the high school level.

But taking university or college courses inside Canadian prisons has become extremely difficult — and in some cases impossible — because the federal government does not allow prisoners access to the internet, while paper correspondence courses have been almost entirely eliminated.

“They’re supposed to be rehabilitating people, integrating them back into society,” Frazier said. “But they’re stifling them. … It doesn’t make any sense.”

After searching unsuccessfully for a correspondence course that didn’t require internet access, Frazier enrolled her son in an online program at Athabasca University and essentially created a paper correspondence course herself.

She printed and mailed to the prison all of the course material, including a 500-page electronic textbook, and relayed any information she received from the instructor to her son in nightly phone calls.

For online quizzes, Frazier’s son sometimes convinced a sympathetic teacher at the prison to print out screenshots of each question from an internet-connected staff computer. He would then give the answers to his mother over the phone so she could input them online.

“It was the only way,” Frazier said.

The United Kingdom, Australia, parts of the U.S. and several European countries all provide varying degrees of internet access to prisoners for educational purposes, but Canada lags behind. The pandemic-accelerated shift to online-only distance learning means Canadian prisoners arguably have less access to higher education today than they have had in decades.

Fewer prisoners are pursuing post-secondary degrees and diplomas as a result. Those that do — like Frazier’s son — are met with daunting roadblocks.

The Correctional Service of Canada says security is their primary concern, and there are also technical challenges to enabling internet access in federal prisons because of the age of many of the facilities.

Still, CSC said it’s “committed to improving offenders’ access to computer-based learning and post-secondary education.”

A spokesperson pointed to a pilot project, launched in 2020, that offers some inmates in some minimum and medium-security prisons access to limited digital educational material, including a handful of college courses.

For Zinger and other critics, the CSC’s efforts are not good enough. He said the service should provide more support to inmates who want to educate themselves because ample evidence shows it is one of the best paths to rehabilitation — and that’s CSC’s main job.

“Why don’t we give those who want to ameliorate their situation the tools and the support they need?”

The Correctional Service of Canada is required by its policies to provide a high school education to any inmate who has not completed Grade 12. This is their education priority, they say, since four out of five prisoners test below a Grade-10 level when they arrive at an institution.

The CSC is not required to provide access to post-secondary education, despite the fact that the federal government has noted in policy documents that a basic education is “not sufficient to prepare incarcerated individuals for successful reintegration.” The CSC says its teachers are “available to support” inmates who choose to pursue post-secondary education on their own.

Until recently, tuition fees and the slow pace of prison mail were the main obstacles for inmates trying to get a diploma or degree. Today it’s a lack of technology, said Rick Sauvé, a former prisoner who now works as a peer support worker helping inmates transition out of prison.

Sauvé, 71, earned a bachelor’s degree from Queen’s University in 1987 while he was serving a life sentence. He did it primarily via paper correspondence, with some in-person classes.

That’s not an option for today’s prisoners, he said, adding that getting an education was “critical” to his success, both in terms of his well-being while he was incarcerated and his ability to find and keep a job when he was released. When Sauvé entered prison in 1978, he had a Grade 9 education. By the time he got parole in 1995 he was halfway to a Master’s degree.

“It was transformative,” he said. “The world opened up to me. I saw that my life could take many paths.”

It also gave him a goal and a sense of pride in his accomplishments, he added, something he could share with his family. When his daughter visited him in prison, they often did school work together.

“I started to see myself as a student, not just a prisoner.”

11 computers for more than 500 inmates

Prisoners who want to pursue university or college programs are responsible for all aspects of their participation themselves, including costs.

Frazier, who works full-time at a non-profit in Alberta, spent her evenings and weekends researching, printing and mailing course materials to the prison for her son.

“A lot of ink, a lot of paper.”

It took the better part of a year, but they eventually got through the first course.

At the rate they were going it would be 30 years before Frazier’s son completed his degree.

Frazier’s son pleaded guilty to second-degree murder as a young offender and was sentenced as an adult to life in prison. The Star agreed not to publish his name or the name of his penitentiary because he feared that publicly criticizing the CSC could negatively affect his chances of receiving parole. The Star also agreed to use Frazier’s maiden name to avoid identifying her son.

Besides the lack of internet, Frazier’s son also struggled to get regular computer access, which limited his ability to type his assignments — a requirement of the online course.

There are 11 desktop computers at the prison for more than 500 inmates, so it was difficult enough to book computer time before the pandemic. When social-distancing restrictions were put in place, computer and library access were often cut off entirely.

In January 2022, Frazier’s son made a formal request for his own laptop — which he would pay for and which would not be connected to the internet — so that he could complete his assignments in his cell, where inmates were largely confined at the time.

The prison warden denied his request, saying it was against CSC policy. Computers are only provided to inmates to review electronic disclosures in their legal cases.

This wasn’t always the case. Until October 2002, inmates were allowed to have computers in their cells as part of their personal property. But after some inmates were caught using smuggled modems to access the internet and CSC’s networks to commit crimes, personal computers were banned.

All technology has been tightly restricted ever since. Even today, the only approved way for an inmate to save a computer file is on a floppy disk. The CSC says they are “exploring” letting inmates use USB devices and intend to conduct a pilot project.

More than a decade ago, the Office of the Correctional Investigator highlighted how the U.S. Bureau of Prisons had begun using a closed email system that allowed inmates to communicate with pre-approved family contacts, recommending that CSC look into doing the same.

Repeated recommendations to increase inmates’ access to technology have gone unheeded in the years since, and Zinger, who has been Canada’s correctional investigator since 2017, has become increasingly exasperated.

“The (CSC) has continued to maintain obsolete infrastructure and technological platforms for such an extended period of time that these problems now appear insoluble,” he wrote in his 2019-20 report. “CSC is so far behind the community standard that it seriously puts into question its legal obligation to prepare and assist offenders for release.”

A 2019 paper by Queen’s University’s Lisa Kerr and Samantha Bondoux is equally unsparing, writing that CSC’s internet ban “ensures that inmates will lack the basic skills required for nearly all forms of modern employment following release.”

“These policies are so dysfunctional,” Kerr and Bondoux write, “that one wonders how the status quo has been allowed to exist for so long.”

Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who oversees the CSC, declined to be interviewed for this story. His office deferred all questions to the CSC.

A CSC spokesperson said a digital education pilot project offers some inmates access to high school courses, workplace certifications and college “micro-credentials” — short, certificate-awarding training courses — through a “cloud-based” program with “controlled internet access.”

Internal CSC data shows inmates have completed more than 2,000 micro-credential courses in the last two years.

A limited number of courses from St. Lawrence and Loyalist colleges were also recently made available to some inmates in Ontario as part of the pilot, which the CSC says it is expanding across the country.

“CSC is working on modernizing its education program and improving offenders’ access to computer-based learning,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson also mentioned Walls to Bridges, a program run out of McMaster University, in which a local college or university professor teaches a course — at no cost to CSC — inside a prison or jail to both inmates and non-incarcerated students. A dozen courses were offered across the country last year.

El Jones, an activist and professor at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, works with graduate students to create a handful of individualized paper correspondence courses each year for prisoners in Nova Scotia.

She said these kinds of community initiatives are valuable to those who can participate in them, but they are not enough to meet demand or fulfil CSC’s responsibility.

“Even if you don’t care about the person in prison,” Jones said, “you should think about what it means for society as people get out.”

The government’s own research shows investments in prison education pay for themselves. CSC found $6.37 in direct savings for every dollar spent on education “due to its effect on recidivism, and the power education has in keeping an individual from reoffending.”

Frazier’s son started his second Athabasca University course in 2022 but he immediately ran into obstacles. The course included 45 online videos essential to understanding the other material, and prison staff said they couldn’t download the videos for him to view offline.

Seeing the burden his studies were putting on his mother, he enlisted a friend to send him online resources. He would mail his friend instructions for what to research. The friend would try to find something relevant, print it and mail it back to the prison. The process took months.

Then last spring’s federal workers’ strike shut down the prison library, cutting off computer access. Frazier’s son ended up paying $600 in additional fees to Athabasca because he needed multiple extensions, but he eventually completed the course.

He told his mother it would be his last, at least until after he is released.