Information Poverty and the Cost of Prison Library Cuts
It is widely understood that a society reveals its character in how it treats those with the least power. In Canada, that measure is under strain.
Planned reductions of $132.2 million to Correctional Service Canada spending by the 2028–29 fiscal year are expected to affect institutional services, including prison libraries. Proposals to eliminate professional library staff, framed as administrative efficiency, risk removing a core element of rehabilitation. More fundamentally, they risk creating conditions of state-sanctioned information poverty behind bars.
Information poverty is not simply a lack of books or general access to information. It is a structural condition in which individuals lack the support, skills, and guidance needed to find and use information effectively. Removing trained library staff moves prisons in precisely this direction.
Many incarcerated individuals enter the system with limited formal education and uneven digital literacy. Information must be mediated, explained, and contextualized if it is to be meaningfully used. Library staff provide this mediation. They assist with legal and educational research, support literacy development, and help individuals navigate complex information systems, including across cultural contexts. In a prison environment—where access is already restricted and needs are often acute—these functions are essential. Without them, the practical ability to read, learn, and think independently is diminished.
The effects are not evenly distributed. Indigenous and Black people remain significantly overrepresented in federal custody, as documented by organizations such as the John Howard Society of Canada and acknowledged in federal reporting. Reductions in access to information therefore deepen existing inequalities, limiting opportunities for education, legal empowerment, and reintegration.
These changes also sit uneasily with the purposes of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, which commits the correctional system to rehabilitation and safe reintegration. Meaningful access to information is not incidental to that mandate; it is central to it.
Treating prison libraries as expendable is a false economy. Information poverty does not eliminate costs; it redistributes them—undermining rehabilitation and increasing the likelihood of poorer outcomes after release.
Creating conditions of information poverty in prisons is a policy choice with significant consequences. The question is not whether we can afford to maintain meaningful access to information behind bars. It is whether we can afford to deny it.
