A Tale of Circles of Support and Accountability: A SMART Approach in Jeopardy
Back in February 2015, the Church Council on Justice and Corrections (CCJC), released a very promising evaluation report on the Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) program that operates across Canada. CoSA is a “community-based reintegration program, grounded in restorative justice principles, that holds sex offenders accountable for the harm they have caused while assisting with their task of re-entry into communities at the end of their sentences”.
The evaluation, the first of its kind in Canada, gives an in depth description of how the program works, documenting it’s success rate and cost savings due to reduced recidivism and reoffending. In short, the evaluation says that this program works.
Great news!
But then, on March 2nd 2015, it was announced that as of March 31, 2015, Correctional Services Canada (CSC) would not renew the funding it has been providing since 1996, as a partner to CoSA. The program has additional partners in numerous Canadian cities such as the Mennonite Central Committee Ontario (MCCO) for the program operated in Kitchener, Hamilton and Toronto. MCCO has funding from CSC until March 31, 2018.
CoSA Canada quickly released a statement to clarify and restate the real impacts of this program: a proven model that addresses a high risk crime against vulnerable people in a humane and accountable way and shows that it can reduce recidivism of the highest risk sexual offenders by 70 – 83%.
This is what we at the Crime Prevention Council would be inclined to call a “smart on crime” approach to reducing crime and victimization:
- the program is based in good evidence,
- the approach is measured and documented in similar ways across programs,
- it has produced excellent results,
- it is proven to reduce and prevent further crimes at a lower cost than keeping an individual incarcerated for “life”, and,
- helps to reintegrate individuals into our community, which is where 95% of people exiting prison, including those convicted of sexual offenses, will return eventually at the end of their sentences
Meanwhile, this ‘made in Canada’ approach has been successfully exported to a number of jurisdictions in the U.S. and the U.K., in addition to France, The Netherlands, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Latvia and South Korea.
When programs show that they accomplish what they set out to do at comparatively low investment and provide a high return on investment to the safety of our community, their sustainability is not only vital, but smart and it makes so much more sense to support of them rather than cut them.
As such, the decision by CSC to cut funding for CoSA is tough to understand and needs further dialogue and consideration.