Ontario’s solicitor general says two more inmates who were accidentally released from a provincial jail have been recaptured, with three still on the loose.
The latest figure is a 50 per cent drop from the six Premier Doug Ford confirmed were missing in mid-April as his government faced major questions over how jails it oversees were routinely releasing inmates by mistake.
A couple of weeks later, the government said the figure was actually five.
Then, on Thursday afternoon, Solicitor General Michael Kerzner revealed two more lost inmates had been re-apprehended.
“What we’re doing is, firstly, we’re getting the number of improper releases to zero,” he told reporters.
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“For example, today the number is three. It will go to zero because we put in the strengthening of the oversight and the (associate) minister and I have worked very hard. We’ve had an incredible effort made to get that number to zero. We will get there.”
Kerzner reiterated that if an accidentally-released inmate posed a risk to public safety, local police would decide to issue a public notification.
In mid-April, Global News revealed more than 150 inmates were improperly released from Ontario’s jails over the past five years, something the government is notified about.
Jails tracked 32 improper releases in 2021, 31 in 2022, 25 in 2023 and 30 in 2024 — a total of 118 over four years. The majority were a result of “institutional issues” rather than mistakes made by the courts.
The government determined 77 were because of “errors or oversight at the institutional level,” 39 were court errors, one was another stakeholder, and one case was thought to be a mistake but actually “determined to be proper.”
A spreadsheet showing information from January to September 2025 said seven of 39 improper releases reported during that period were at Maplehurst Correctional Complex.
Despite receiving the notifications — and being briefed on the topic in January 2025 — Kerzner implied he was unaware of the issue, promising to “get to the bottom of it.”
He has since been forced to apologize “unreservedly” to legislators for repeatedly and incorrectly claiming inmates who are wrongly released are immediately re-apprehended, when some are actually still missing months after their release.
The government said it was aiming to introduce new oversight and systems to eradicate the issue.
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