Addicted inmates face substantially elevated risk of reincarceration: B.C. study

A new study led by a B.C. criminology professor says people jailed in the province who have addiction and mental health issues are at high risk of being reincarcerated within a few years of being released.

Amanda Butler, an assistant criminology professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., says former inmates with substance use disorders and mental health issues are more likely to end up back in jail than those without addiction or “mental health needs” on their own.

The study published in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior says 72 per cent of people with both substance use and mental health disorders ended up back in jail within three years of being let out.

Butler said in an interview Thursday that people let out of provincial jails often find themselves without adequate housing or employment options.

She said jailing people with mental health and substance use disorders often exacerbates their problems.

“The reality is that for many of these folks, they are ill and they haven’t had their needs met and it’s not serving anybody to continue to put them in institutions that will continue to fail them,” Butler said.

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Substance use disorders, Butler said, are the strongest indicator that someone will likely reoffend and end up back in custody, and the corrections system is not designed to get at the root causes of criminality.

“In Canada, we still have a system where our purpose and principles of sentencing are largely focused on denunciation, deterrence, retribution,” she said. “It still largely is a system that is focused on denouncing criminal behaviour (and) separating people from society.”

She said the correctional system is focused on reducing crime and addressing public safety, “but the reality is that so many of the factors that are related to offending don’t fall within their mandate.”

Butler’s study found that 70 per cent of former inmates with substance use disorders alone also went back to prison within a few years of their release.

She said the correctional system is “siloed” off from the health and social services sector that could focus on improving offenders’ health and possibly reduce the risk of reoffending because “the social determinants of health overlap considerably with the social determinants of crime.”

Butler’s study examined data collected by BC Corrections for 13,109 people who were released from provincial jails between October 2012 and September 2014.

She says the disorders are often undertreated at the facilities, and her study highlights the need to treat the problems to reduce reincarceration.

Overall, the study found 61 per cent of released inmates from the time period ended up back in jail within three years, and those with both addiction and mental health disorders were found to be at “substantially elevated risk of reincarceration.”

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Butler said crunching the numbers on thousands of individuals makes it easy to lose sight of the human toll of a punishment-focused correctional system.

“When you’re writing up the findings and you’re trying to make sense of it and you’re interpreting the data, you are reminded that every one of these statistics is a person, that this is a human being,” she said.

“A lot of them are suffering, not just at the stage in which their crime was committed, but many of these people have been failed by health and social service and education systems their entire lives up until when their offending began.”