Researchers at Simon Fraser University have discovered that incarcerating criminals makes them less likely to re-offend.
The long-term study found that offending youth who spent more time in custody went on to commit less crimes.
According to lead researcher Associate Professor Evan McCuish, while numerous studies have been conducted in the past analyzing the link between prison and recidivism, they have mostly been conducted in the United States during "periods of mass incarceration."
"Canada is not the United States," he said. "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."
McCuish explained that the findings showed a correlation between length of incarceration and tendency to re-offend, but that the reasons were not entirely clear.
"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 he and others at SFU's criminology department would conduct supplemental studies to analyze the results and pin down exactly what it is about incarceration that deters future criminality.
"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 said.
The study tracked around 1,700 offenders from their teens into their 30s.