by Nicole Findlay
During her undergraduate studies, Renee Malcom focused on the relationship between sexual arousal and attitudes towards rape. Since then she has begun delving into the impact of prison sentences on future crime.
Now an MA student in the Department of Psychology, Malcom has recently examined the correlation between length of time served in prison and the likelihood of reoffending upon release. Specifically, she was looking at a variety of criminals who had committed sexual offences.
“We are looking at the relationship between incarceration length, age and recidivism. In other words, do longer prison sentences make a criminal offend more or less in the future and does sentence length have the same affect on recidivism for all offenders or is it influenced by age?” explained Malcom.
That is, does a long prison sentence act as a deterrent, or does serving time with hardened inmates further school an offender for future crime. Malcom also examined whether or not a 19 year old was more likely to be affected by the length of his sentence than a 40 year old might be.
The research was a follow up to her professor, Kevin Nunes’s earlier research on sex offenders. The data they examined included research conducted 19 years earlier by other forensic psychologists.
Nunes and Malcom compared those original cases to files pertaining to their current criminal records to see what types of offences they had been reconvicted for since their original prison sentence and how long they had spent in prison during the follow-up time.
“The one thing we have found is that we are seeing a relationship between incarceration length and recidivism for the highest risk offenders,” said Malcom. “We will be continuing to do a more in depth analysis of the data to determine if age, offence type and other factors are playing into this relationship.”