B.C. youth who were incarcerated less likely to re-offend later, research shows

A new study has found that B.C. youth who were previously incarcerated were less likely to re-offend following their release from prison.

The long-term study from Simon Fraser University and led by Evan McCuish, an associate professor in the School of Criminology, used data from BC Corrections to look at offenders in the Canadian justice system.

While there have been studies conducted on this subject before, researchers found the majority of those examined populations in the United States. Fewer people are incarcerated in the Canadian justice system so the proportion of people in prison who have committed serious crimes is higher.

“Eighty per cent of those studies were conducted in the United States, and almost all of them occurred during periods of mass incarceration,” McCuish said.

“Canada is not the United States. Canada does not practice mass incarceration, and we don’t have privatized prison systems, so we do need our own research to begin to investigate these themes.”

McCuish followed individuals from adolescence into their 30s and examined how they responded to imprisonment.

Researchers began interviewing youth in custody in 1998 and continued until 2011. They had a sample of about 1,700 people and followed their paths from youth to adulthood.

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While the data does indicate that incarceration leads to a reduction in future offending, McCuish urged 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 said. “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?”

McCuish said that researchers plan 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 added.