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January 2017

Volume 59, No. 1 | Go to abstracts

Articles

Page 1

Validating the Predictive Accuracy of the Static Factors Assessment (SFA) Risk Scale for Federally Sentenced Offenders in Canada
L. Maaike Helmus, Trina Forrester

Page 26

Social Networks as Predictors of the Harm Suffered by Victims of a Large-Scale Ponzi Scheme
Rebecca Nash, Martin Bouchard, Aili Malm

Page 63

The Pains of Incarceration: Aging, Rights, and Policy in Federal Penitentiaries
Adelina Iftene

Page 94

Crime and Public Transportation: A Case Study of Ottawa’s O-Train System
Jordana K. Gallison, Martin A. Andresen

Research Note

Page 123

Replication and Reproduction in Canadian Policing Research: A Note
Laura Huey, Craig Bennell

 

Abstracts

Validating the Predictive Accuracy of the Static Factors Assessment (SFA) Risk Scale for Federally Sentenced Offenders in Canada

L. Maaike Helmus, Trina Forrester

The Static Factors Assessment (SFA) is used by the Correctional Service of Canada to assess criminal risk. It includes 137 items in three sub-components: the Criminal History Record (CHR), Offence Severity Record (OSR), and Sex Offence History Checklist; the first two sub-components are examined in this study (109 items). Although the SFA has been used for all federal offenders for nearly 20 years, there are no studies examining its ability to predict community outcomes. This study included 8,767 federal offenders within a five-year follow-up period, and it examined revocations without an offence, readmissions for any offence, and readmissions for a violent offence. The overall SFA, CHR, and OSR were related to recidivism outcomes, although the sum of the items in the CHR significantly out-predicted the overall SFA rating. Most items in the CHR had significant predictive accuracy, whereas roughly half the OSR items were predictive; nonetheless, the OSR added positive incremental validity to the CHR. The SFA overall rating and the CHR and OSR sub-components are valid for offender risk assessment with Canadian federal offenders, although the current results suggest that improvements to the SFA should be undertaken.

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Social Networks as Predictors of the Harm Suffered by Victims of a Large-Scale Ponzi Scheme

Rebecca Nash, Martin Bouchard, Aili Malm

Ponzi schemes are a type of social network where investors are recruited by a variety of social actors. This study uses network analysis to investigate whether the type of social tie that influenced victims of the Eron Ponzi scheme to invest is associated with the different harms victims experienced from their involvement in the fraud. The results reveal that trust in social ties is associated with increases in many of the types of harm reported by victims. The findings also reveal that victims who were influenced to invest by multiple types of social ties generally reported lower levels of harm.

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The Pains of Incarceration: Aging, Rights, and Policy in Federal Penitentiaries

Adelina Iftene

The number of aging people in prison has been on the rise in the last few decades. Their heightened needs place burdens on correctional institutions that have not been encountered before. This article presents the results of a study conducted with 197 older prisoners. This study’s findings identify issues raised by chronic pain in older prisoners and the management of this pain in a prison setting. Correctional Service Canada (CSC) does not acknowledge older prisoners as a vulnerable prison group, and correctional policies thus tend not to include age (and its implications) as a variable worthy of consideration. Data from this study raise some under-explored issues about the matter of aging behind bars that are in need of future research. If the findings are confirmed in the future, the CSC might find its policies challenged in court. To prevent that from happening, a systematic reform of the CSC’s policies – in particular, the medical ones – will need to be undertaken, with the goal of making them age-sensitive.

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Crime and Public Transportation: A Case Study of Ottawa’s O-Train System

Jordana K. Gallison, Martin A. Andresen

The following research seeks to provide insight into the phenomenon of crime and public transit systems. We utilize a case study, the O-Train in Ottawa, to determine whether the presence of an O-Train station predicts crime in the surrounding neighbourhood. Crime data were obtained from the Ottawa Police Service between January 2006 and December 2006 to help identify potential clustering of offences in close proximity to the O-Train stations. Geo-spatial measures (e.g., local Moran’s I) were used to help determine whether certain offences were more prominent in areas that hosted an O-Train station, and we then used this outcome variable in a logistic regression. Our results show that the presence of an O-Train station is related to an increase in theft of vehicle, but not to robbery or commercial burglary.

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Replication and Reproduction in Canadian Policing Research: A Note

Laura Huey, Craig Bennell

In this paper, the authors discuss the importance of replication and reproduction studies to building an evidence base in policing research. This evidence base, they note, is important to the task of informing sound policy and practice in policing and in relation to community safety efforts more generally. Despite the recognized value of such work, a scoping analysis of peer-reviewed Canadian policing research published over the past 10 years reveals that very few researchers engage in research aimed at replicating other studies. Potential remedies are suggested in the paper’s conclusion.

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