Anyone who thinks that a stretch in a Canadian prison is like a week at "Club Fed" should tune in to Inside Canada's Prisons, a CBC News Big Picture special. The three-hour presentation, originating live from the Collins Bay Penitentiary in Kingston, begins tonight at 7 p.m. on Newsworld and at 8 p.m. on CBC.

Host Peter Mansbridge, who will anchor tonight's 10 p.m. national news live from The Joint, hopes the special will help "demystify" Canada's prison system.

"There are a lot of misconceptions on both sides of the argument," says Mansbridge.

He says a recent visit inside one of Canada's toughest lockups, Archambault Penitentiary, north of Montreal, was a real eye opener. "There are no golf courses or swimming pools at that place," he adds, describing the inmates there as "the baddest of the bad."

Tonight's show will take place before an audience of inmates (who will probably be pretty cranky since they're missing NYPD Blue). Mansbridge will be joined by Corrections Canada officials and other experts with CBC correspondents such as Brian Stewart, Mark Kelley and Wendy Mesley filing documentary reports from other prisons across Canada.

Mansbridge says Corrections Canada provided unprecedented access. Only one inmate, notorious serial killer Clifford Olson, was off limits, and that was due to a court order.

Still, CBC chose not to contact such infamous inmates as Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. "We weren't looking for sensationalism here, we were looking for a real airing of the issues," says Mansbridge. "We made our decisions about who we went for based on that."

Mansbridge hopes that that leads to a lively debate about the strengths and weaknesses of the prison system. "We basically want people to speak their mind, whether they're inmates or guards or whoever they might be. Everybody seems serious about trying to make the system better."