As I became more experienced working in this field, however, I came to realize that the work for those who wanted to stop committing crimes was far more complex than learning how to find a job and how to stop getting high. In my work I have discovered that turning away from a criminal lifestyle requires leaving behind a very elaborate set of beliefs, social networks, and long practiced coping mechanisms. Basically it involves having to learn and develop an entirely new “culture.”

As our community corrections treatment program evolved, we began to notice things such as:

• many of our clients had no apparent substance abuse problem;
• many clients had a court order to attend substance abuse treatment because they told a judge that they committed their crime(s) because of using drugs or alcohol in an attempt to receive a lighter sentence – often at the advice of defense lawyers;
• many of our clients did not recognize themselves having a substance abuse problem – even if their use was characteristic of what we considered ‘problematic’
• many of our clients reported that their use was part of the ‘lifestyle’ along with criminal activities, other risk taking behaviors and feelings of hostility and distrust towards the “straight world;”
• many of our clients reported committing numerous offences while sober without getting caught but were arrested while committing an offence while intoxicated;
• many drug traffickers were court mandated to substance abuse counseling because it was assumed they were selling to supply a habit but it turned out they had little or no addictions problems and were selling simply to make money;
• often when clients said they felt substance abuse was a problem for them, they wanted to talk about it and not the offence and often this occurred when the offence was of a more shameful nature such as a sexual offence or domestic assault;
• many clients who received only substance abuse counseling recidivated shortly afterwards;
• many clients who had identified substance abuse problems but had addressed other criminogenic needs, such as attitudes or hostility, and began to make changes in their criminal behaviors, seemed to also decrease their problematic use of substances, indicating that the lifestyle and attitude changes led to a natural reduction in drug and alcohol use.

These experiences and observations led my colleagues and I to begin to question the usefulness of focusing on substance abuse treatment as a way to reduce recidivism. This, in turn, led me to question the relationship between of substance abuse and criminal behavior and, eventually, to question the utility of continuing to criminalize certain substances in Canada.

Risk Factors For Criminal Recidivism

The research on effectiveness of treatment programs in reducing recidivism continues to point to a need to target many factors other than substance abuse. These factors have been termed criminogenic needs by the pioneers in the field and have been identified primarily through meta-analytical research that determines the presence of these factors in offenders and compares the rates at which recidivism occurs when a factor is present to the recidivism rates of clients without these factors.

Such research overwhelmingly indicates that certain characteristics are stronger predictors of future criminal activity than others. The presence of a substance dependency, or any other pattern of substance use, is not considered a strong risk factor according to the research literature. Based on research into “what works” in criminal rehabilitation, Andrews (1995) and his colleagues concluded that: “the best established of the risk/need factors may be assigned to a major and minor set.” The major set includes: