A new, long-term study of youth who have experienced incarceration in British Columbia has found that those who have spent more time in custody showed a decrease in reoffending following release from prison. The research was led by Evan McCuish, an associate professor in the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, and published in the Journal of Criminal Justice.
This study used data from BC Corrections to look specifically at offenders in the Canadian justice system. While there have been many previous studies concluding that prison either has no impact or even influences increased levels of offending upon release, in most cases they examined populations in the United States.
"80 per cent of those studies were conducted in the United States, and almost all of them occurred during periods of mass incarceration," says McCuish. "Canada is not the United States. Canada does not practise mass incarceration, and we don't have privatized prison systems, so we do need our own research to begin to investigate these themes."
Because far fewer people are incarcerated in the Canadian justice systems, the proportion of people in prison who have committed serious crimes is higher. They are also especially likely to have experienced the most challenging environments. To fully understand this population, McCuish's research followed individuals from adolescence into their thirties and examined how they responded to imprisonment.
The researchers began interviewing youth in custody in British Columbia, starting in 1998 and continuing up until 2011. That gave the researchers a sample of about 1,700 individuals, whose paths they followed from youth into adulthood. While the data does indicate that incarceration leads to a reduction in future offending, McCuish urges caution in extrapolating too far from these conclusions.
"We found that, in British Columbia, people who spend more time in prison end up engaging in less offending in the future," he says. "We don't know, however, whether this is due to deterrence or due to rehabilitation processes. Are people not re-offending as much because they were deterred by their prison experience, or are they not re-offending as much because of the rehabilitative services that they received in prison, and that actually helped them reduce their offending upon release?" It is also possible that people released from prison are subject to closer supervision and monitoring, which in turns reduces reoffending.
McCuish plans to conduct further studies into the reasons for these findings and hopes his research will provide evidence to help policymakers make better informed decisions when creating new policies and guidelines.
"What I see as my job is to provide that evidence basis so that the decisions that policymakers make are actually informed by research and not just informed by what we think anecdotally," he says.
