Local Police Want Funds For Prison Work
Civic leaders in Kingston, Ontario, are hatching a cash-for-convicts pitch to Ottawa. Officials have resurrected a long-standing gripe that the city, the penitentiary capital of Canada, faces policing costs above anything faced by any other community. This report from the Kingston Whig-Standard.
There are five federal prisons within city limits. “There is a lot of time that’s spent by Kingston Police, either directly or indirectly, on offender management,” Kingston Police Chief Stephen Tanner said yesterday at a meeting of the city’s police services board, the civilian body that oversees the department … Tanner said Kingston Police spend more than $700,000 annually just on salaries for officers who work full time on prison-related issues. The city does not get any compensation for those expenses. For decades, city politicians and police chiefs have asked Ottawa for extra money, but the federal government has consistently rejected the appeals …
Kingston Police investigate crimes inside prisons, track escaped convicts, respond to a large number of incidents involving released offenders and dedicate substantial resources to monitoring released, high-risk prisoners. Three Kingston officers are members of a special police penitentiary squad that is co-ordinated by provincial police. Two Kingston officers are on a provincial team that tracks escapees and parole violators and two other Kingston officers deal with high-risk and dangerous offenders who have been released from area prisons … The figures do not include other costs that are impossible to quantify, he said, such as responding to problems at the former federal halfway house on Portsmouth Avenue or answering complaints about the conduct of paroled inmates …
Corrections Canada is Kingston’s fifth largest employer, with more than 2,600 workers, more than double the number of employees of the largest private sector employer. The presence of the penitentiaries and related activities injects more than $150 million into the local economy annually.