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.
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.
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?’”
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 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.”
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.”
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.
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.