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Alberta researchers building largest study on life behind bars in western Canada

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What started as a study into the effects of radicalization in western Canadian prisons and jails has quickly turned into one of the largest studies into life behind bars for those inmates.

Kevin Haggerty and Sandra Bucerius started the University of Alberta Prison Project (UAPP) in 2016 as a way of digging into how deep radicalization behind cell walls is. Three years later, the effort has grown into one of the largest prison studies in the world.

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The team has now conducted over 600 interviews with prisoners and correctional officers at provincial jails and nearly 100 interviews at the federal prison level. The interviews provide an in-depth look at life behind bars, touching on everything from drug abuse, the correlation between offenders being victims of crime earlier in their lives.

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“It was a way to build rapport and to get to the major research topic, you’d ask them about, you know, what’s a day look like in here for you? What are the challenges? Who do you hang out with and by virtue of that, they told us a remarkable range of things about a remarkable range of things,” said Haggerty.

Haggerty said the project found that imprisonment in this part of the country did not systemically foster radicalization based on the population within each institution. And after so many interviews, the research naturally flowed into looking at other issues, including fentanyl and the opioid crisis that continues to plague the country.

“While we were in there and doing data collection, the fentanyl crisis was essentially making its way into the prison right in front of our eyes; we spent time on units on which people overdosed quite regularly while we were in the prisons. It was a topic that many of the prisoners and the staff talked about,” said Bucerius.

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The researchers said they have now seen measures like needle exchange programs introduced into the system. The Drumheller federal institution even began operating a safe consumption site this summer as a way to mitigate the dangers of the opioid crisis.

While they’re still collecting and analyzing data, Bucerius said she soon hopes to present the findings to authorities as a way to assist in making better, evidence-based decisions around incarceration in Canada.

“Hopefully our findings will be a kickstart for evidence-based changes,” said Bucerius. “So one example of that is the victim overlap data has sparked a discussion around providing victim services to prisoners who are currently incarcerated, which has not been the case before.”

dshort@postmedia.com

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