Correctional Service Canada is finalizing plans to cut all prison librarian positions at federal institutions, in a move that advocates say violates human rights and will actively harm efforts to rehabilitate prisoners.

In a statement, the correctional service said the move is a cost-saving measure as numerous government departments look to make trims under the 2025 federal budget.

Advocates and a former commissioner of the correctional service say, however, that prison librarians are essential for helping prisoners access a safe space within prisons.

They also say that cutting librarians is tantamount to depriving prisoners of libraries as a whole, which would violate minimum rules around access to libraries established at the United Nations.

“The most effective crime prevention strategy that can happen in the prison is to provide more education, more training, more access to reading materials,” said Melissa Munn, a retired professor of criminology at Okanagan College.

“Cutting anything from the library, whether it’s the budget or the librarian or any of the space allotted for libraries, is detrimental to society as a whole.”

Munn has worked directly with prisoners for 40 years and studied the impacts of incarceration.

She said librarians are invaluable in providing prisoners with access to things like distance learning or correspondence courses, and that they make decisions based on prisoners’ diverse interests and their limited budgets.

Under the United Nations “Nelson Mandela rules,” adopted in 2015, accessing libraries in prisons is listed as one of the rules for good treatment of prisoners.

Cutting librarian positions, Munn said, flies in the face of research that showed the importance of prison education in rehabilitation.

Don Head, who was the commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada between 2008 and 2018, said that he stopped a similar effort to cut librarian positions when he was in office nearly 20 years ago.

“They have educational information, they have legal information, that many of the offenders need to access in relation to their own personal cases,” he said of librarians.

“So just having books, or digital access to some information, isn’t necessarily going to be helpful unless somebody is there who has the knowledge and skills about that material.”

Open letter

Tom Best, the director of non-profit Book Clubs for Inmates, said librarians are critical in finding books appropriate for prisoners’ reading levels, and losing institutional knowledge like that would be a shame.

His organization estimated there were at least 31 librarians employed across 38 unique federal prison libraries.

Best said an open letter started by the non-profit that asks federal Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree to reverse the cuts has been signed by over 2,000 people, human rights organizations and other groups.

“This is not merely a budgetary adjustment. It is a policy choice that disproportionately harms those already marginalized and contradicts Canada’s stated commitment to evidence-based corrections and human rights leadership,” the open letter reads in part.

In a statement to Radio-Canada, a Correctional Service Canada spokesperson said the service was mandated to save $132.2 million by the 2028-29 fiscal year.

They estimated cutting the positions would save the department around $2.4 million, and said 18 librarians had already received letters in January indicating their employment could be affected.

“As part of our efforts aimed at increasing access to digital resources in our institutions, inmates now have better access to information and learning opportunities,” the statement reads in French.

“Many institutions already operate according to a modern library model without a dedicated librarian on site.”

The statement adds that, starting on April 1, the last librarian positions would be gradually eliminated as part of plans that were still being finalized.

Munn said she doesn’t understand the department’s justification that resources were being digitized, saying the librarian cuts are coming at the expense of human rights and public safety.

“There are some digital mechanisms that people can use within the libraries at very particular supervised times, but that is extraordinarily limited and certainly not a replacement for what we currently have,” she said.