2 - The Study

Summary

Setting

The core set of subjects in this study were male prisoners in the Ontario region of the Correctional Service of Canada. From this population, we selected only recent recidivists, defined as those who had previously been imprisoned in Canada and had been returned to prison for a new offence committed within a year of their previous release.

Given the constitutional arrangement that mandates responsibility for prisoners in Canada, assignment to the federal system normally means that offenders have sentences of at least two years, with those assigned shorter sentences going to provincial institutions. However, if an offender commits a new offence while under supervision after release from a federal institution, he is returned to federal custody to serve both the remainder of the original term and the new term.

The Ontario region is the largest in the Canadian federal system, drawing from a population of almost 11,000,000. At the time of the study, it included just over 3,000 federal inmates. All prisoners entering the region were sent initially to a Reception Unit in Millhaven Penitentiary, where they were held until sent to their assigned receiving institution. If they had been in the community for only a short time and under supervision when they reoffended, they were sometimes returned within about two weeks to the institution from which they had been previously released, but usually they were held in the Reception Unit for one to two months.