Ralph Whitfield Morris, 73, was convicted of murder and given a life sentence in 1982 and he now faces charges of escaping custody.

His departure from the native healing village at Agassiz, B.C., on Wednesday added to public calls for changes to the way prisoner's are assessed by the justice system.

He left the facility apparently out of frustration with the paperwork required to be transferred somewhere else, but returned after two days in the elements, police said.

"He basically returned because of the weather conditions and he realized what he had done was not right," said Const. Tara Harrington of the RCMP.

Morris's time on the lam followed the escape of Blane MacDougal, who hopped the fence and disappeared from the Ferndale Institution in Mission, B.C., on April 19.

MacDougal, a 62-year-old dangerous offender who started serving a life sentence in 1969 for charges including murder, sexual assault with a weapon and kidnapping, is still on the loose.

The pair of cases have caused both the federal government and the Opposition to condemn a system that would allow offenders with such violent records to be housed in facilities with little stopping them from leaving.

While both the federal Conservatives and Opposition Liberals blamed each other for the failings of the justice system, each argued something must be done.

"In both of these cases, Corrections Canada has shown the same kind of weak and irresponsible approach to dealing with them. Neither of these two convicts should be in minimum-security," Liberal public safety critic Ujjal Dosanjh said in an interview.

Dosanjh said Ottawa needs to better fund the country's prison system, which he said has been choked with insufficient funding and resources, and toughen rules dealing with how inmates are assessed.

A spokesman for Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day echoed the call for new rules.

"Minister Day is concerned with the circumstances of both these recent incidents," John Brent said in an e-mail.

"We have begun to repair a failed Liberal corrections system by initiating and completing a comprehensive corrections review.

Changes to the system under which offenders are classified is a key element of our government's transformation of the corrections system."

But this sort of partisan finger-pointing contributes nothing to finding out what, if anything, is wrong with the current system and what should be done about it, said criminology Prof. Neil Boyd.

"People have the temptation to say that this was a mistake, but the reality is we don't have all the information before us," said Boyd, who teaches at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C.

"To see this as a failure of the system is jumping to a conclusion."

In general, Boyd said it's not uncommon for convicted murderers to be released into the public, and a minimum-security facility is one of the final steps before that happens.

He said violence is typically restricted to young men, making rehabilitation more likely as they get older, and he noted less than one per cent of convicted murderers will be involved in violent crime again.

"The fact that a person has a record in violent crime does not signal that at age 50 the person is at all likely to commit violent crime," he said.

"Yes, people can commit pretty violent crimes when they're younger, but the best evidence suggests that no matter what we do, the overwhelming majority age out of crime."

Statistics provided by the federal government suggest that while minimum-security facilities see the bulk of escape attempts at federal prisons, escapes from such facilities are not common.

With about 2,500 inmates in minimum-security facilities, according to data from April 2007, there have been an average of just more than 30 escapes a year during the past four years.

Of the 125 such escapes since 2004, only one offender remains at large.

There are no statistics available breaking down what types of offences the escapees were serving time for.

There are also no statistics outlining where the 395 inmates who have been declared dangerous offenders currently in custody are housed.