Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Feb 09/00) - A $28-million jail set to replace the Yellowknife Correctional Centre is designed to serve the NWT for the next 30 years.

But the predicted demands on a new corrections facility assume community justice programs will remove some of the burden currently being shouldered by the territorial justice system.

"We're planning that with the increased use of community sanctions that more and more people will be serving sentences in the community as opposed to being incarcerated," said territorial corrections service director John Dillon.

The Yellowknife Correctional Centre was originally designed to accommodate 32 inmates but has held as many as 212, Dillon said. Currently 148 prisoners stay there.

The new facility will have a capacity to hold 146 prisoners. It will house both young and adult offenders.

Then Justice Minister Stephen Kakfwi announced last year the government would build a new facility rather than renovating the new one, after it was found that renovating YCC was not cost effective.

Dillon said Justice Minister Jim Antoine will be making an announcement about the new jail in the coming weeks revealing, among other things, where in the city the new prison will be built.

"The current plan is to have the existing building demolished," Dillon said.

Capacity at YCC has increased at the expense of programming designed to rehabilitate prisoners.

The facility has undergone numerous renovations since it was built in 1967, Dillon said. Woodworking and metalworking workshops have been turned into dormitories and courtyards have been roofed in to provide more spaces for beds.

Dillon said division has reduced some pressure on the facility. Before division about 70 Nunavut residents were in YCC. That number now stands at 25. The Nunavut government, which is facing a prison space crunch of its own, contracts space for its residents from the GNWT.

The decision to renovate the existing YCC and add a male young offenders facility nearby was made by the last government, in June 1998.

But when engineering and architectural firm Ferguson, Simek and Clark concluded it would be cheaper and faster to build a completely new building, the GNWT decided June. 4, 1999 to build a new facility.