Bug or Feature? What “Jail, Not Bail” Gets Wrong About Justice
A former corrections professional on why the system isn’t broken — it’s working exactly as designed.
“Nature gave us one tongue and two ears so we could hear twice as much as we speak.” — Epictetus
On March 19, 2026, Pierre Poilievre sat across from Joe Rogan and delivered a line that would circulate across every platform within hours.
“We got to toughen up our justice system. It got way too soft,” he said.
What followed was a compressed, confident, and deeply misleading account of bail in Canada — one that collapsed an entire legal apparatus into a single, intoxicating claim: “In Vancouver, they had to arrest the same 40 guys 6,000 times in one year. 40 guys, 6,000 arrests.”
Segment c/o Joe Rogan Experience #2470 - Pierre Poilievre
Rogan, predictably, called it “bananas.” The audience, predictably, agreed.
And just like that, the most complex, contested, and consequential intersection of law, liberty, human suffering, and institutional failure in Canadian public life was reduced to arithmetic.
Forty people. Six thousand contacts. Remove them. Problem solved.
I don’t wholeheartedly disagree with Poilievre. There is a small cohort of people who cycle repeatedly through the criminal justice system, and their stories are real, their harms tangible, their visibility to frontline workers undeniable.
I spent years working in community corrections — supervising people on bail, probation, and parole. I’ve watched the revolving door from inside the building. I’ve written the pre-sentence reports. I’ve sat across from people on their fifth, tenth, fifteenth-plus charge. I know the frustration that lives in Poilievre’s rhetoric, and I know why it resonates.
But I also know what that rhetoric conceals.
What I challenge — emphatically — is the framing. The superficiality. The absence of the kind of consideration that anyone who has actually worked inside this system would immediately recognize as missing.
Poilievre isn’t telling a lie, exactly. He’s telling a story so selective that it functions as one.
This article is an invitation to hear the rest of it.
Two Stories, One Silence
Within twenty-four hours of the JRE episode dropping, CBC’s Front Burner aired an episode called “The Bail Backlash.” It is, in many ways, a competent counterpoint — more measured, more multi-voiced, and substantially more honest about what we do and do not know.
The Front Burner piece introduces listeners to Ron and Meechelle Best, who lost their daughter Kelly in a crash caused by someone out on bail who had already breached his conditions multiple times. Meechelle’s testimony is devastating:
“Three times he was given bail. Three times he walked away. Why does someone who shows no respect for the law, the police, the judges or for society keep getting another chance?”
That is a real question and it deserves a real answer — not a slogan.
But what the Front Burner episode does well, and what the JRE interview struggles to do at all, is hold multiple truths simultaneously. It introduces retired Crown attorney Mike Murray, who argues that the balance has been lost. It brings in Shakir Rahim of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), who points out that we hear about every failure and none of the successes — because compliance doesn’t make headlines.
And it features defence lawyer Nader Hasan, who represented Umar Zameer, the man acquitted of all charges after being accused of intentionally killing a police officer — a case where premiers and mayors publicly denounced bail being granted, only for the Crown’s case to fall apart at trial.
Hasan’s observation is worth sitting with:
“You don’t want to talk in the abstract, so let’s not talk in the abstract. When you say someone’s bail is denied, what that means is you are throwing them in a prison with horrific conditions for what may be three years until they can get to actual, actual trial.”
Both of these media artifacts — the JRE interview and the Front Burner episode — flatten complexity. But they do so in different and predictable directions. JRE collapses the system into actors (repeat offenders) and arrives at a solution of incapacitation: remove the bad actors, crime drops. Front Burner expands the system into processes (courts, rights, delays, conditions) and arrives at a solution of calibration: adjust the balance, protect the vulnerable.
Neither asks the harder question.
The Question Nobody Is Asking
The question is not “Is bail broken?”
The question is “Broken relative to what objective?”
Because consider what we already know. According to Statistics Canada, more than seventy percent of people in provincial jails across this country are being held on pre-trial detention — a figure that has climbed to nearly eighty percent in some provinces, according to the CCLA. They have not been convicted of anything. They are, in the language of law, “legally innocent”.
This is not a marginal statistic. It is the defining feature of provincial incarceration in Canada. And it has been growing for decades.
Holly Pelvin, in her landmark 2019 study of 116 remand prisoners across four maximum-security provincial facilities, documented what this looks like on the ground. Her research reveals a cross-institutional system of punishment that begins at arrest, intensifies through court appearances conducted under conditions of physical pain and psychological degradation, and compounds through daily life in overcrowded cells where lockdowns sever the most basic human need: communication.
Pelvin’s respondents described court days as among the most visceral experiences of their detention — woken at five in the morning, strip-searched, shackled to other prisoners, transported in steel-box vans, given a granola bar for lunch, and often returned to their units after evening lock-up, unable to access phones or showers. One participant was arrested while swimming and was forced to appear in court in a bikini—covered by a paper jumpsuit—repeatedly. Ostensibly, because she had not yet been convicted and therefore was not yet entitled to the prison-issued garb reserved for ‘true criminals’.
Ontario Court of Justice data show that in 2025, about 56% of cases that began in bail court were ultimately withdrawn, stayed, or otherwise resolved without a conviction. These are people whose lives were disrupted — housing lost, children unattended, employment severed, relationships frayed.
In theory, oversight mechanisms exist: ombudspersons, inspectorates, complaint processes. But in practice, these bodies rarely have enforcement power, and the terrain is rife with reticence.
Filing a formal complaint means self-identifying within a system where you are already vulnerable — where being labelled a complainant can invite scrutiny rather than resolution, where the process itself adds to the bureaucratic weight of an already interminable wait, and where the stigma of having been accused in the first place discourages the very people with the most to say from saying it.
The result is that for most people who pass through remand without a conviction, there is no meaningful recourse — not because none exists on paper, but because the conditions under which it might be exercised are structured, however inadvertently, to discourage its use.
The Front Burner episode deserves credit for surfacing data that complicates the “too soft” narrative. Provincial numbers show that the percentage of people being released on bail has actually fallen since 2018, from fifty-seven percent to fifty percent.
Recent CBC reporting using freedom-of-information data found that close to eighty-two percent of all prisoners detained in 2024 were on remand. More people are being detained before trial, not fewer. Yet the political consensus is that the system is too lenient.
As Rahim observes:
“We don’t actually collect any data about the number of people who are released on bail and allegedly re-offend. So if you were to go to the Minister of Justice and say, ‘hey, can you show us over the years, you know, how the situation has gotten worse’ ... They can’t answer that question.”
This is not a detail.
This is the basic foundation upon which the entire debate rests — and it is hollow. We are making sweeping legislative changes based on affective intensity, not empirical clarity.
Liars Figure, and Figures Lie
Poilievre’s “40 guys, 6,000 arrests” claim has been fact-checked multiple times.
The actual figure, confirmed by Vancouver Police, refers to approximately 6,385 “negative police contacts” — a category that includes suspects and charges recommended, not literal arrests. The timeframe is unclear. The offences are overwhelmingly property crimes. As one legal analysis noted, arresting 40 people 6,000 times in a single year would be physically impossible. It is, in the most generous reading, a compressed truth. In the less generous reading, it is a statistic engineered to produce outrage.
But the deeper problem isn’t the number. It’s the logic. Poilievre’s argument rests on what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error — the tendency to explain behaviour as a property of individuals rather than a product of circumstances. If we can just identify the bad actors and remove them, the logic goes, the system works. This is seductive because it is simple.
It is also wrong.
The criminological evidence on this is extensive and consistent. Cross-national comparisons compiled by Public Safety Canada show that crime rates and incarceration rates do not move in lockstep. The United States experienced its largest crime drop through the 1990s while simultaneously incarcerating more people than any nation in history. Canada’s crime rate and incarceration rate both declined after the early 1990s. England and Wales saw both rise together. The same crime trajectories coexist with wildly different incarceration patterns and vice versa, which means that locking people up is, at best, one variable among many — and, at current levels, one with diminishing returns.
A 2014 review by the National Academies of Sciences found that estimates of incarceration’s crime-reducing effect have fallen substantially over time and are small in magnitude at current levels. Some econometric studies even find that marginal increases in prison populations are associated with increases in crime, suggesting negative returns at high incarceration levels.
None of this means that some people should not be detained.
It means that detention as a strategy — as the centrepiece of a justice platform — is intellectually bankrupt. And it means that anyone offering “jail, not bail” as a policy position is either unaware of this evidence or indifferent to it.
The Drive Home
I want to tell you about a pivotal moment early in my career.
Working within ‘community corrections’, I conducted a pre-sentence investigation — the kind of deep, biographical interview that helps a judge understand who is standing before them, not just what they’ve been charged with. The client had been convicted of an assault. My job was to compile the facts, the history, and the context.
What I was not prepared for was what emerged in the course of that conversation. This person — the ‘offender’, as the system would have me think of them — disclosed, for the first time in any formal setting, that they had been the victim of serious abuse in childhood.
The drive home that evening was long. I felt sad and shattered and confused. Because here was the system telling me that perpetrators and victims are different categories — neat, separable, administrable. And here was a human being telling me, through their story, that they are often the same person.
This was not the last time it happened. It was the first of many. And each time, the same dissonance: the system requires you to see someone as a client in need of correction, a moral agent who has offended the majority and must be disciplined accordingly. But the person sitting across from you is someone who hurt because they were hurt, who didn’t know what to do with their pain, and whose best wasn’t good enough — but who nevertheless was trying.
The criminal justice system would have us believe that this complexity is an exception. It is not.
It is the rule.
“Hurt people hurt people” is not a cliché.
It is a research finding. And until our politics can hold that finding without flinching, we will continue to build systems that punish suffering and call it justice.
The question I want to leave you with now is simple but uncomfortable:
If you were arrested tomorrow — wrongly, on someone’s word — and held for months or years in conditions that Canadian courts have called intolerable and degrading, would “jail, not bail” still feel like common sense?
Have a story to tell?
Frontline Peer™ exists because justice-impacted people — the workers who carry the weight, the people the system processes, and the families navigating the aftermath — are rarely the ones shaping the public conversation. Book a discovery call to share more with our founder, or write to us here.
If this article resonated with you, I want to hear from you. Share it. Comment. And if you have a story of your own — from any side of the system — reach out directly. Your experience is not anecdotal. It is evidence. And it belongs in this conversation.
If this article resonated with you, I want to hear from you. Share it. Comment. And if you have a story of your own — from either side of the system — reach out directly. Your experience is not anecdotal. It is evidence. And it belongs in this conversation.
Editor’s Note: This article asks what the bail debate gets wrong. A companion piece, “The Machine Beneath the Slogan”, goes further — examining the hidden architecture of plea bargaining, why tough-on-crime policy tends to produce the opposite of its stated goals, and what a justice system designed to shrink would actually look like.
Read it here → when it’s published.