Canada’s prison system is predicated on rehabilitation and reintegration—yet, the country’s own correctional service is defunding the most integral program to realizing that aim. 

Correctional Service Canada (CSC) has announced the suspension of its federal prison education program in Quebec correctional facilities, effective June 30, 2026. At present, Quebec offers prison educational programs under Commissioner’s Directive 720 at two federal penitentiaries: The Cowansville men’s and Joliette women’s institutions. 

Collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel (CEGEPs) are integral to the delivery of educational programs to incarcerated individuals in Quebec, as CEGEP instructors teach the majority of courses in prisons. They offer upper-level, pre-professional, and field-specific courses that extend past general education objectives, facilitating greater personal and professional development. Crucially, these CSC-CEGEP partnerships allow incarcerated people who have not completed primary and/or secondary education to pursue studies that go beyond CSC’s Adult Basic Education requirements. 

Of CEGEPs holding partnerships with CSC, Cégep Marie-Victorin is the primary institution offering pre-university programs in the province, having been involved in education in correctional contexts for approximately 50 years. However, due to financial constraints, CSC has decided not to renew its contract with Marie-Victorin in its current form, emphasizing the need to locate a cost-neutral alternative.

Without these programs, the Canadian justice system’s stated purpose of “assisting inmates to become law-abiding citizens” cannot be realized. For a legal system predicated on rehabilitation, accountability, and a safe return into one’s community, this radical reduction in funding is fundamentally incoherent with the mission of correctional institutions.

//The state’s aim: Reintegration and recidivism//

According to CSC Quebec’s Regional Communications Manager, Jean-François Mathieu, the purpose of educational programming in prisons is primarily centred on post-correctional outcomes with a two-pronged goal: Promoting reintegration and reducing recidivism.

“These programs allow inmates to acquire the basic skills in literacy and personal development that they require in order to succeed in the community [after incarceration],” Mathieu wrote in a statement to //The Tribune//. 

Yet, education bears merit beyond reducing criminal activity, with proven positive impacts on the psychological health and livelihoods of incarcerated individuals. Jeffrey Kennedy, Assistant Professor in McGill’s Faculty of Law, elaborated on how education’s rehabilitative value does not—and should not—stand alone as the sole justification for the program’s existence in prisons.

“Education is a social good, period, and we shouldn’t limit its value to ‘rehabilitative’ purposes, even if it also helps prevent future crimes,’” Kennedy stated in a written statement to //The Tribune//. “The same reasons why McGill [community members] are themselves part of this university and see education as valuable—for personal growth, career prospects, relationships, interest, or seeing education as a good in itself—also apply to the people we have imprisoned.”

Samuel Rochette, Professor of Psychology at Cégep Marie-Victorin and now-former instructor at the Cowansville men’s institution, affirmed this sentiment, describing how the time commitment education in prison requires, alongside its ‘opt-in’ nature,  encourages incarcerated people to develop positive habits both during and after imprisonment. 

“I’ve known for several [incarcerated people] who stopped taking drugs, at least on a regular basis, because they were much more focused on what they were doing [in classes]. And that’s not an exception,” Rochette said in an interview with //The Tribune//.

//Prisoner well-being, desistance, and identity re-formation//

The benefits of educational programming are in no way limited to post-correctional outcomes. While reducing recidivism is a key aim of the state in its carceral project to deter future law-breaking, the more normative, prisoner-centric benefits of these programs remain and are perhaps more profound. 

Frédérick Armstrong, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Chair in Applied Research for Education in Prison at Cégep Marie-Victorin, has conducted significant research affirming the benefits of education to the well-being of people in prison. Armstrong’s work, mainly his qualitative analyses, is crucial to the progressive development of UNESCO’s policy agenda, particularly the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

 He collaborated with Cégep Marie-Victorin educator Lyne Bisson on a 2024 report, conducting interviews with more than 40 people across five provincial prisons. Participants described how participating in educational programs can build self-esteem, foster a sense of academic competence, and even make the days pass faster.

CEGEP-led educational courses also empower the incarcerated to redefine their identities and self-perceptions in a process known as desistance, or the evolution in identity that occurs when incarcerated individuals undergo effective rehabilitative programs. Drawing from one of the interviews he conducted with Bisson, Armstrong offered an example of how this phenomenon may manifest.

“A young man [in the prison] […] made a big thing of being called a student by the prison guards. So, the prison guard would say, ‘Okay, all students can go to school.’ And he’s like, ‘I’m a student?’ [….] That identity shift is key in the process of desistance,” Armstrong shared in an interview with //The Tribune//.

The ability of CEGEP professionals to support these shifts in the identity and behaviour of incarcerated people is not just important for students’ personal growth; Parole Board members rely on educators to report on prisoner desistance when evaluating whether to offer parole and, if release is granted, what its conditions will be. In an open letter to CSC shared with //The Tribune//, Theodore, a student incarcerated at Cowansville who withheld his last name, described how educators can serve as advocates for imprisoned people.

“The Parole Board doesn’t live here among us, and all they have to go by is our parole officer, [correctional officer], and program officers, in most cases,” Theodore shared in the letter. “CEGEP […] [is] a program in which inmates can accomplish presentable metrics to the Parole Board about what they have done here. ‘How can I show you I’m doing better if there’s nothing good for me to do?’”

//Prison Education as an Opportunity for Socialization//

Educational programming in prisons also fosters another crucial aspect of reintegration: Adopting pro-social behaviours. Relying on his personal experience, Theodore described how the classroom environment—particularly its use of ‘rehearsals’—can support the development of prisoner social skills. 

“The specific environment created by [the] CEGEP operating in this penitentiary creates a transitional environment for offenders to ‘rehearse’ living pro-socially. This includes skills, but also social situations: Navigating teacher relationships, submitting to the curriculum, and navigating interactions with peers,” Theodore wrote. “The [institutional program] uses role-play very often to […] make sure we know to apply the skills we are being taught.”

By strengthening these social skills, prison education programs make significant progress toward rehabilitation efforts, addressing the behavioural, cognitive, and emotional roots of criminal activity. Rochette added that without these course offerings, it is difficult for people in prison to find opportunities for socialization.

“I had a student tell me, […] ‘In 18 years, you’re the first real human interaction I’ve been having,’ and I wanted to cry at that moment. I mean, that was really touching.”

//The Psychological and Human Rights Dimensions of Punishment//

The ability of educational programs to offer opportunities for socialization and facilitate desistance is undeniably critical to the psychological health of imprisoned people during and after incarceration. However, such benefits are greatly impaired when the method of punishment is incompatible with these positive outcomes. Drawing from his expertise in psychology, Rochette offered a theory-based explanation of the threats posed by detention as a mechanism of punishment.

Operant conditioning models state that punishment must follow three rules to effectively deter future repetition of the behaviour: Immediacy, consistency, and proportionality. Therefore, a punishment must be intuitively related to the initial wrongdoing for it to result in positive behavioural shifts. 

However, these three conditions are rarely met in Canadian prisons. Mandatory minimum sentences and long prison sentences are frequently applied to nonviolent or drug-related offences, amounting to incoherent and disproportionately severe models of punishment. 

The ineffectiveness of current models of punishment in the criminal justice system is epitomized by the persistence of administrative segregation, more commonly known as solitary confinement. Administrative segregation is a temporary correctional measure under which certain incarcerated people are isolated from the rest of the prison population to mitigate violence or security risk. Although administrative segregation was officially abolished in 2019, it persists in the form of Structured Intervention Units (SIUs), often described as ‘administrative segregation by another name.’

Educational programming is thus one of the few opportunities to counterbalance the negative elements of punishment. It is the provision of such programs in the face of these unnecessarily punitive measures that is crucial to reducing recidivism, improving prisoner well-being, and achieving the positive identity shifts associated with recognition and socialization. As a result, as Kennedy describes, depriving incarcerated people of these programs proves counterintuitive.

“It seems indefensible to me to justify someone’s imprisonment on the basis of ‘rehabilitation’ […] and then deprive that person of the opportunities they need to realize that,” Kennedy wrote. “There can’t be a disconnect between the reasons we sentence people and the actual realities of imprisonment.”

//Financial constraints and online prison education//

Despite these immeasurable benefits, budget pressure on CSC has forced the end of Cégep Marie-Victorin as it currently stands. However, such austerity calculations entirely neglect that the program, beyond being socially and ethically beneficial, is an economically efficient investment. 

“The program [costs] around $400,000 CAD to $450,000 CAD a year [….] Keeping someone in prison in Canada, especially in Quebec, is about $100,000 CAD to $120,000 CAD a year,” Rochette said. “Of our 40 students, we only need one or two of them to not go back to prison for this program to be productive and, in fact, save money [for] the government.”

And such educational programs are in high demand: Many incarcerated people transfer into the Cowansville and Joliette institutions for the sole purpose of attending the Cégep Marie-Victorin program, sometimes leading to waiting lists. In fact, when CSC announced that budget cuts had forced the end of CEGEP education in prisons, Rochette reported that prisoners immediately offered to direct their Inmate Committee’s budget toward funding the program. As a result, when scaled up against the psychological and emotional benefits of these programs, such financial constraints appear increasingly inconsequential.

Although it has not yet been officially announced, CSC has communicated its intention to reformat prison education into an online model, known as the Offender Digital Education (ODE) program, in hopes of continuing the program while cutting costs.

However, the majority of both tangible and intangible benefits of prison education are lost when educational programming shifts online, making these austerity measures lethal to the program rather than simply cost-cutting.

“[Online prison education] has been tried elsewhere. For instance, in France, it was a fiasco, it was horrible. They wasted a lot of money, and people used the computers there to hack, and it didn’t work,” Rochette stated. “And plus, you remove the human connection, the interaction, […] the normalcy, and the alternative to their lifestyle that is very appealing to them.”

//Moving forward: An international human rights standard for prisoner education//

Prison education is not a program unique to Quebec; it is an internationally pursued human rights imperative. Given Armstrong’s work in the UNESCO chair role, prisoner education in Quebec bears implications for policy work far beyond Canada, let alone the province.

However, research on the efficacy of prison education models tends to emphasize the need for randomized controlled trials and qualitative research as more scientifically reputable justifications for implementing such programs. Yet, such empirical justifications are, in many ways, secondary to the pursuit of what is really a human rights goal.

“I’ve had that conversation […] where evidence-based policy is very important. I don’t have any evidence that education is a human right, right? That’s not evidence-based. That’s normative. It’s a political statement to say that people have a right to education,” Armstrong explained. “So, if we show that education does not reduce recidivism, it would still be legitimate to provide education in correctional contexts because it remains a right.”

While empirical studies, educator and prisoner testimonies, and financial calculations all suggest that the prison education model should be preserved in its current form, such evidentiary support is, in many ways, extraneous. Rather, the necessary and sufficient condition that obligates prisons worldwide to provide education to the incarcerated is one simple fact: Education is a human right.

//“I’m a student?”//

50 years of prison education made that question possible, but it took only one budget cycle to force the program’s closure. Reinstate CEGEP education in Quebec prisons—not because it saves money, not because the data demand it, and not because it stands to reduce recidivism, but because human rights should not disappear behind bars. 

“I got in an accident that involved some sea urchins,” Natalie Joy Gale, a PhD student in McGill’s Department of History and Classical Studies, said in an interview with //The Tribune//. 

Gale recalls wiping out in an ‘urchin-y’ area of reef while surfing in Puerto Rico, resulting in several sea urchin spines puncturing the skin on her hands and feet. After the incident, she turned to the internet for answers, making use of the suggested home remedies she found online. That same evening, still in severe pain, Gale came across a paper that warned of the dangers of sea urchin spines should they remain embedded for too long. The following morning, she woke up feeling unwell and decided to seek help from the local emergency room. The doctors removed as many of the spines as they could, although they could not remove them entirely due to the risk of infection.

Keeping that paper in mind, Gale visited more doctors when she returned to Montreal and eventually got the care that she needed.

With the seemingly limitless amount of health information available on the internet, it is no surprise that around half of Canadians reported accessing these sources in 2024—albeit likely for information unrelated to sea urchins. Online resources—whether from social media or established medical websites—can make it easier to figure out what you may be experiencing, what treatments are out there, and whether a trip to a family physician or the emergency room is warranted. But beyond the information intended to address more immediate health concerns lies a whole world of wellness content which aims to promote a holistic, healthy lifestyle.

Upon first glance, some of the wellness content found on social media seems fairly innocuous. Chia seed pudding with colourful splashes of fruit and a drizzle of honey. A monochromatic workout set. An early wake-up to catch the sunrise and get to the gym. A general vibe of put-togetherness.

A glimpse beneath the aesthetic surface, however, reveals something more sinister. Instructions on how to get “snatched.” Claims that purchasing one product will fix your health problems. Mysterious health remedies lacking any scientific backing. Moreover, much of this content seems to suggest that the responsibility of maintaining one’s health should be left almost entirely to the individual, and that the social determinants of health—factors beyond genetics and lifestyle that shape health outcomes, such as socioeconomic status, race, and gender—are to be ignored.

Take wellness influencer Reagan Spencer’s thoughts on the matter, for example, in her video captioned, ‘The truth most people don’t want to hear’:

“You make time for what’s important to you, and if you’re not making time for it, then it’s obviously not that important. You can make excuses all day about why you can’t eat healthy, why you can’t get x amount of steps in, or why you can’t get to the gym. But when something truly matters to you, you find a way.” 

In her view, any difficulty you experience in maintaining your health is a moral failing, a lack of willpower, and/or a priority issue above all else: You simply don’t want it badly enough.

In an email to //The Tribune//, Jonathan Jarry, scientist and science communicator at McGill’s Office for Science and Society, explained how an individual’s actions are unfairly framed as the sole determining factors for one’s health in online wellness content.

“When you get sick, you are blamed for it. You didn’t eat right enough, you didn’t exercise enough, you didn’t buy the right supplements, you didn’t pay for enough sessions at your local infrared sauna,” Jarry said. “This blame is misplaced, and it causes anxiety, and I think it’s an insidious consequence of believing that health can simply be bought at the right price.”

Crucially, in championing these “simple” fixes, wellness influencers act as though health exists outside of social or economic conditions, despite the fact that racialized and lower-income communities are disproportionately neglected by the healthcare system, and experience poorer health outcomes and lower life expectancy overall. Wellness influencers’ disregard of these systemic injustices is made all the more problematic when considering the size of their audiences; Spencer herself has over 450,000 followers on TikTok, meaning this merely individualistic narrative is disseminated on a large scale.

“Good modern medicine, including public health, recognizes that health is not just a choice. Sure, there are decisions you can make to reduce your risk of becoming ill, but so much of [your health] is outside anyone’s control,” Jarry explained. “It has to do with who your parents are and the genetic material they gave you. It has to do with where you grew up and in what social class. It has to do with how much money you earn now. The wellness movement, however, has always thrived by denying this reality and selling you solutions under the guise of self-empowerment.”

//A healthy body is a thin body (allegedly)//

Beyond the fact that wellness influencers are frequently attempting to sell you a product, they are also often giving instructions on how to lose weight. Of the wellness industry’s $6.8 trillion USD valuation in 2024—which encompasses economic activity in sectors that allow people to incorporate wellness into their lives—$1.3 trillion USD comes from personal care and beauty, while another $1.1 trillion USD is tied to healthy eating, nutrition, and weight loss. For reference, the wellness sector’s total valuation is around 16 times larger than that of the global sports economy.

Moreover, the beauty and health industries at large are increasingly intersecting. Influencer Jada Moylan paints a clear picture of this overlap on her TikTok page, whose bio reads, “Here to get hotter and healthier.”

In her recent posts, Moylan frames lifestyle practices that are objectively good for you, such as weightlifting and eating well, almost solely in relation to how they will make you look. Rather than simply sharing a workout routine and encouraging people to exercise just for the sake of strength, these posts revolve around being thin and toned while avoiding bulkiness. This framing coincides with the semi-recent comeback of “thinspo” content in broader social media contexts—although its presence has arguably been continuous.

“The idea that a healthy body is a body that adheres and conforms to the ideals that the dominant society has established, which always reflect certain ideas about class, certain ideas about race and certain ideas about thinness, I think that it’s all kind of interlocking,” Gale said.

Indeed, there is a significant relationship between socio-economic status and weight, with rates of obesity and socioeconomic status being inversely correlated in developed countries, and positively correlated in developing countries. Concurrently, the means by which Moylan claims one can achieve this look completely obscures problems in the modern food market.

“Eat simple, boring meals, eat high protein, eat whole foods, limit sugar, limit alcohol, limit processed foods,” she suggests, among other tips, when describing how to achieve your dream body.

Moylan is correct in pointing out that these practices are largely good for you, but when examining what food is readily available to the public, it becomes clear why people cannot simply switch to a whole foods diet. In the United States, around 75 per cent of the food supply is thought to be ultra-processed. This includes products such as energy drinks and hot dogs, as well as staples like sliced bread and yogurt. They have been specifically engineered to be nearly irresistible to the human palate, and furthermore, they are energy-dense, easy to prepare, and above all, more affordable.

These ideas that health should be a means through which to realize patriarchal beauty standards, and that anyone can take up a healthier lifestyle at will, only further isolate people in an already broken healthcare system, pointing the blame at us and ignoring the systemic issues which leave us stranded in the first place. Moreover, the abundance of content that focuses on weight loss is ironically making people unhealthier, indeed contributing to increased body image issues and eating disorders.

//Moylan’s team did not respond to The Tribune’s request for comment.//

//Pseudoscience and misinformation//

In the same breath as telling you that you aren’t reaching your health goals simply because it’s not important enough to you, and that you should be exercising and eating well for the sake of getting your body “bikini-ready,” wellness influencers make unsubstantiated claims about how well their health regimen really works. There are countless scientifically dubious yet financially lucrative health products they promote, ranging from mouth taping, coffee enemas, or dietary supplements—none of which are subject to U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations.

In a TikTok with nearly 400,000 likes, self-proclaimed “beauty guru” Tatyana Lafata takes us through her daily supplement routine for “glass skin, a happy gut and long healthy hair.” Once again, we see the overlap of beauty and health, and this time, it can be attributed in part to a daily spoonful of edible sea moss.

“It has 92 out of 102 minerals on this Earth. A serving of sea moss every day will change your health. Skin, hair, brain function, mental clarity, anxiety, appetite, everything. This will cure it,” she says.

First of all, it is not clear which 102 minerals Lafata is talking about: There are over 5000 minerals on our planet, and humans only require about 30 of these to survive. Second, while we cannot say that she //hasn’t// seen benefits from taking sea moss, it is completely irresponsible to make such a lofty statement about how it could benefit others.

//A symptom of deeper issues//

Despite their questionable claims, it should come as no surprise that wellness influencers are successful. Not only is there legitimately useful information to be distilled from these murky waters—even though it is tied up with notions of beauty and pseudoscience—but there is a general sentiment of dissatisfaction with the healthcare system across both Canada and the United States. This is especially relevant for women and BIPOC individuals who are routinely dismissed in healthcare spaces. Social media allows people to access information quickly, avoiding the long wait times that patients experience in clinics today.

Moreover, along with the already-heightened sense of institutional mistrust, we have people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, adding fuel to the misinformation fire—a man whose government has gutted research programs across the country and rolled back vaccine mandates that were long understood to be safe and effective.

Jarry touched on some of the factors that are correlated with the birth of RFK Jr.’s //Make America Healthy Again// movement, which itself is tied to the wellness industry.

“​​The COVID-19 pandemic was a radicalizing event across multiple lines. It brought to the surface basic inequalities that had always been there but that some of us were ignorant of; but it also reenergized a somewhat waning anti-vaccine movement,” Jarry wrote. “The fact that mRNA vaccines were being rolled out for the first time was a big reason for the distrust, and I think that anti-vaccine influencers like Kennedy managed to sway people who were otherwise pro-vaccine into becoming more hesitant of them.”

//Media literacy: A step in the right direction//

Knowing that both government officials and wellness influencers are spreading health misinformation, it is //crucial// that we learn, as consumers, to evaluate the legitimacy of what we encounter online, so as to avoid completely disregarding the internet as a useful tool for gaining health information.

In an interview with //The Tribune//, McGill science communication specialist and faculty lecturer Diane Dechief suggested how students in particular can work together to critically examine information they find on the internet.

“It’s really important for students to realize they can be part of this good communication system too [by] asking people how they found out about this information and maybe pointing them towards places to verify it or like better information,” Dechief said. “So I feel like there’s a bit of a citizenship responsibility as well as the units that provide us with healthcare […] to make things ready to be drawn on in these ways, […] I do think people are turning away from social media in a lot of cases and looking more toward what’s the good information and what’s the good evidence, and to kind of carry that forward a bit better.”

Dechief leaves us with questions to ask ourselves when we come across health information online to evaluate its legitimacy.

“What is the source? […] Are they from a major publisher or not? […] Are there real editors attached to it? […] What are the vested interests? Who’s paying for this? Is this publicly funded or not?”

Ultimately, we cannot reduce systemic injustices to individually manageable problems. We must call on policymakers to address the dearth of media literacy education seen today, as well as the general public sentiment against science and the scientific method. We must ask for stronger fact-checking on our social media platforms that profit from misinformation.

And finally, we must remember that, while we do have some control over our health, maintaining our wellbeing will always be at odds with the values of a neoliberal society, which encourages us to forgo our bodily needs for the sake of growth and productivity. To truly feel better, we must first challenge the overarching systems that frame us as mere individuals in the first place.

//If you are a McGill student looking for health and scientific resources, please consult the Eating Disorder Centre (EDCSSMU), the Student Wellness Hub, or one of McGill’s many wonderful librarians.//