As I've indicated in some of my opening comments, the reason why a very large part of it was down is because the department had anticipated there would be much a greater increase in the number of prisoners, and we simply did not experience that rush. When I became the public safety minister, I reviewed any spending in that respect. I simply said that we did not need new prisons. What we did, in fact, was build new units in existing prisons, and we were able to shut down two prisons, one of which the unions have been asking to shut down for an awfully long time in Kingston. Kingston should have been shut down perhaps 50 or 60 years ago. We were able to do that.
The estimates by my own department were that by this time, there would be over 18,000 prisoners in our prisons, as opposed to the 14,000 who were there in 2010. In fact, we're just a little over 15,000, so we have about a quarter of what our own department estimated. With all due respect to your party, this was thousands and thousands fewer than was predicted by the NDP. The NDP made the comment that we're going to have to have $19 billion in new infrastructure. In fact, the total new infrastructure was about $600 million, and we were able to shut down Kingston and Leclerc. I can't remember what the net saving was by shutting down Kingston, but it's quite significant.
The doom and gloom that was being preached by individuals who had absolutely no understanding of what's going on in the criminal justice system simply didn't materialize. We believe that what our tough on crime policies are doing is simply telling those individuals, who usually got out earlier or weren't even sent to prison because they were on home arrest, that they don't get a holiday anymore. You serve your time. These individuals are in for longer periods of time because judges have sent them there, and that's where they belong. We will continue to work with those individuals when they come to prison, in terms of giving them training and other things that I think they require, but my first priority is to make the streets safe. That is done by keeping these individuals off the streets by incapacitating them in their ability to commit further crimes and victimize ordinary citizens.