There is a simple, sensible way Ontario could save millions of dollars. It wouldn’t require layoffs or cuts to public services. It wouldn’t compromise public safety.

All Premier Kathleen Wynne has to do is direct provincial officials to stop locking up people who have not been convicted of any crime.

More than 60 per cent of the inmates in Ontario’s jails — some 37,000 individuals — are in “presumptive detention” while they await trial or try to come up with bail. The majority pose no threat to society. They have no history of serious or violent crime. They simply can’t come up a surety (someone who agrees in writing to forfeit a specified amount of money if they fail to show up in court).

Incarcerating these suspects may be convenient, but it is neither just nor necessary. Moreover, it is extremely expensive. Each inmate costs provincial taxpayers $183 a day. If they were supervised in the community, the public outlay would plummet to $5 a day.

The provincial Liberals know this.

A government-appointed panel — made up of judges, Crown attorneys, lawyers, court officials, chiefs of police, criminologists and senior officials from the attorney general’s office and the ministry of correctional services — recommended last fall that Ontario scale back its costly, inefficient pretrial incarceration system.

Economist Don Drummond, commissioned to put Ontario’s finances on a sustainable footing, zeroed in on the high cost of jailing non-convicts two years ago. “Ontario must address the trend of increasing custody remand and additional costs associated with this trend if the province is to balance its budget by 2017-2018,” he wrote.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association added its voice this past summer. “Legally innocent individuals are processed through a bail system that is chaotic and unnecessarily risk-averse and that disproportionately penalizes — and frequently criminalizes — poverty, addiction and mental illness.”

But the most conscientious and consistent advocate of reform has been the John Howard Society. The non-profit organization spent a year investigating why Ontario’s prison population was ballooning while the crime rate dropped. Its conclusion: “Bail needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.”

To mark the anniversary of its groundbreaking report, Reasonable Bail, the society sent an open letter to Deb Matthews, the cabinet minister in charge of expenditure reduction, reminding her of the huge savings to be reaped by overhauling remand. “Our provincial jails are overcrowded and at capacity; prisoners sleep two to three to a cell designed for one, at times on mattresses on the floor,” said research director Michelle Keast. “In order to address these complex, systemic issues — and incidentally balance its budget — the provincial government must make a strong commitment to address bail and remand in a substantive and inter-ministerial way.”

The logic seems compelling. So what is stopping policy-makers?

It is certainly not the law. Ontario’s current practice contravenes the Canadian Charter of Rights, which clearly states that “everyone has the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned,” and exceeds the requirements of the Criminal Code, which says: “the justice shall, unless the prosecutor shows cause why the detention is justified order that the accused be released on giving an undertaking (to appear in court when summoned) without conditions.”

Nor is it public opinion. Ontario’s punitive bail system clogs the courts, creates hardened criminals, costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and makes a mockery of the fundamental principle of justice: every person is innocent until proven guilty.

That leaves attitudinal impediments. There are four:

The first is fear, whipped up by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and allies. The federal Tories have convinced people their streets are unsafe, their communities are lawless and the only way to protect law-abiding citizens is to lock up young thugs.

The second is inertia. Police, courts and bureaucracies reflexively resist change.

The third is ignorance. Most Ontarians have no idea how the criminal justice system works or how much it costs to detain people before they’re found guilty.

The fourth is lack of political will.

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Wynne could knock down all these obstacles with one swift kick. She has no stake in Harper’s tough-on-crime agenda. She is not constrained by past practices. She can’t afford to squander public money. And she received a strong mandate from the electorate to clean up the government.

Ontario’s bloated jails would be a good place to start.