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FOUR - Sports and Tertiary Crime Prevention: Desistance from Crime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2023

Yvon Dandurand
Affiliation:
University of the Fraser Valley, Canada
Jon Heidt
Affiliation:
University of the Fraser Valley, Canada
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Summary

At the tertiary level of crime prevention, the goal of interventions is to prevent recidivism or support desistance from crime. In that context, sport-based programmes either in the community or in a correctional setting are sometimes proposed as a means to contribute to the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders. However, there are still very few such programmes for young offenders, whether in the community or in institutions. For instance, there was not a single sport-based programme for convicted young offenders among those we reviewed in British Columbia.

Despite the fact that sport-based programmes targeting known young offenders remain a rarity and that their crime prevention outcomes have never been properly evaluated, these programmes have nevertheless been declared ‘promising’ (Meek, 2020). Without necessarily disputing that premature conclusion, it is important to realize that the promise in question remains largely theoretical. Some preliminary research has attempted to link sport-based interventions and offenders’ desistance from crime. However, at this point, the effectiveness of rehabilitation efforts through sport remains uncertain (Meek, 2012, 2014, 2018; Meek, Champion, and Klier, 2012; Lewis and Meek, 2012; Gallant, Sherry, and Nicholson, 2015; Meek and Lewis, 2014a, 2014b; Parker, Meek, and Lewis, 2014; Sempé, 2018; Psychou et al, 2019). There are still many unanswered questions around whether these sport-based crime prevention programmes (whether administered in the system or in the community) can aid in desistance from crime and how this process works.

Supporting desistance

It is important to understand the process of change that tertiary crime prevention programmes are trying to support. That process is perhaps best described as ‘desistance from crime’. The importance of understanding that process is well recognized within criminal career research which tries to account for the onset of, maintenance of, and desistance from criminal behaviour. However, despite its importance to the criminal career paradigm, desistance is relatively understudied in criminology (Lussier, McCuish, and Corrado, 2015).

Several desistance studies are relevant to the topic of sports and crime prevention. The best-known among them was Laub and Sampson's (2003) ground-breaking multiple-wave longitudinal study on 500 male delinquents from Boston. The study was based on an impressive dataset that stretched over 40 years, with interviews conducted at various points throughout many of the offenders’ lives.

Type
Chapter
Information
Youth Crime Prevention and Sports
An Evaluation of Sport-Based Programmes and their Effectiveness
, pp. 61 - 77
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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