WHY NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IS THE RECIDIVISM RATE

What is the recidivism rate?

It seems like a simple question to answer. It certainly is important. We
want the justice system to rehabilitate or deter offenders from committing
new crimes after they are released. So knowing the rate at which offenders
commit new crimes after being released is crucial.

And yet, the recidivism rate in Canada is unknown.

There are many reason for this, but the most basic one is the constitution.
The federal government handles offenders sentenced to more than two years,
while the provinces deal with offenders serving less than two years, and
young offenders. (Some provinces further subdivide young offenders by age
group.) As a result, there isn't one correctional system in Canada -- there
are many.

The basic problem is that if an offender is let out of one system and later
sent to another, neither system will know that the other is involved. So if
an offender does time in an Ontario jail and is later sentenced to a
federal prison, Ontario will never hear about it.

The same is true if the offender moves to Alberta and is later sentenced to
time in that province's jails.

So how many offenders commit new crimes after leaving Ontario's jails?
Ontario really does not know. No one does.

This may look like a problem that could easily be solved by sharing
information between systems. It's not. It requires comprehensive electronic
data gathering, something the smaller provinces are only getting around to.
It may also violate privacy laws.

More fundamentally, it requires that the various correctional systems count
the same things -- and define those things the same way. They don't.
Statistics Canada considered what it would take to bring all the numbers
together and decided it just wasn't feasible with current resources.

There are many other problems that stand in the way of nailing down the
recidivism rate. Depending on how these problems were dealt with, you could
end up underestimating the actual recidivism rate or overestimating it.
Some researchers even suggest even if there were a single recidivism
figure, it would be largely useless as a way to check how well a
correctional system is working.

There are many reasons for that, chief among them the fact that the
likelihood of an offender committing a new crime varies widely according to
offence type and other factors: Young burglars and old murderers, to take
two examples, typically have such different recidivism rates that averaging
the two rates produces a number that says nothing about either group.

These problems are so tenacious that no Western country with multiple
internal jurisdictions has true recidivism data. That includes the U.S.

The "recidivism" numbers that we see in public debates usually come from
studies that track a small number of released offenders for a few years.
Large-scale studies of this type are rare and their results quickly become
outdated.

Or they are numbers that are close proxies of recidivism: The federal
prison system, for example, counts how many in-coming prisoners have been
in federal prisons before.

Or the data passed off as recidivism rates are simply speculation. Or they
are just made up.

Whatever those numbers are, they are not recidivism rates.