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From Prince Edward Island to British Columbia to Nunavut, Canada is undergoing a massive prison expansion. The federal government is adding 2,700 beds, and the provinces and territories have added or are adding a further 7,000, at an estimated cost of $4-billion. British Columbia has embarked on the most expensive building plan in its history.

“This is, to my knowledge, the largest expansion since the 1930s,” said Matthew Yeager, a penology expert and criminology professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont. “This huge building campaign represents the Americanization of Canadian corrections.”

Imprisonment as we know it in Canada dates back to the pre-Confederation construction of the Kingston Penitentiary in 1835. Today, every jurisdiction is expanding its prisons — and has a pressing need to.

Federal and provincial prisons are resorting to double-bunking, even triple-bunking, to accommodate an increasing number of inmates. This is because more people are being held for longer on remand and because of two Conservative tough-on-crime bills, including the 2010 Truth in Sentencing Act, which eliminated two-for-one credit for time served in pre-trial custody.

The government’s latest crime bill, with its mandatory minimums and the end of house arrest for serious crimes, will add thousands more prisoners and cost untold billions.

Justin Piché, an assistant professor at Memorial University in St. John’s, who has been studying provincial and federal prison expansion for nearly three years, said this inevitably puts provinces and territories “back at square one.”