International Centre for Comparative Criminology (ICCC)

Axis on Intervention
The axis on intervention focuses specifically on research into the effectiveness and accountability of social control. The area devoted to clinical intervention (directed by Franca Cortoni) also includes research projects that focus on the success factors of treatments intended for young offenders, for sexual offenders or for drug addicts, but which also investigate the risks linked to the adoption of assessment methods taken directly from the field of medicine or the abusive prescription of psychotropic medications for those who are incarcerated. The area devoted to intervention in a security context (directed by Stéphane Leman-Langlois) encompasses projects that analyze the effectiveness of police operations in specific contexts such as delinquent networks, cybercrime or police peacekeeping operations. Also under examination is the role of private operators in critical infrastructure protection as part of the fight against terrorism. As for accountability, certain projects are studying the undesirable effects of omnipresent surveillance on social interaction or the practice of marketing police services to private interests, which currently benefits from very little oversight. The area that focuses on community intervention (directed by Danny Dessureault) investigates alternative practices and programs designed for vulnerable populations: It includes projects that focus on the offer of restorative justice for victims of violent crimes, on the most promising approaches to reduce the conjugal violence experienced by Aboriginal women and on outreach strategies for runaway minors living on the street. In this area, the issue of accountability is addressed through the study of alternative citizenship practices as a response to the social inequalities and the discrimination experienced by certain marginalized groups.

Axis on Regulation
The axis on regulation places issues relating to definition and pluralism at the heart of its projects. In the area pertaining to legal regulation (directed by Marion Vacheret), the issue of definition is addressed mainly through the status of young offenders which is being transformed in Quebec under the pressure of increasingly repressive federal policies. The notion of justice is also being examined through projects that study sentencing choice or pre-trial detention. Of course, polycentric regulation (directed by Marc Alain) is the area where the issue of pluralism is examined with the greatest acuity. Research projects study how poorly structured institutional networks are able to define common problems such as "identity theft", "homelessness" or "street gangs". The projects mentioned above also analyze the emergence of joint or concurrent modalities to deal with these problems. The area of extra-legal regulation (directed by Carlo Morselli) takes an offbeat approach to understanding how marginalized or illicit groups may act as regulators under certain conditions. Research projects are studying how isolated Aboriginal communities are attempting to restore methods of conflict regulation that are more consistent with traditional values (and defining crimes very differently than the "white" justice system), how organized crime groups provide arbitration services in certain illegal markets, or how street gangs maintain a type of order that is conducive to the development of illegal activities in the neighbourhoods they control. Of course, pluralism and the issue of defining what constitutes deviant behaviour take on a very particular dimension.

An Original Program
The program's originality comes from its comprehensive approach that enables researchers to address the continuum of regulation and intervention in a decompartmentalized and systematic way. Traditionally, these two spheres of social control have been studied separately, in response to a disciplinary segmentation that saw clinical intervention with delinquents mainly come under the field of psychology while regulation concerned mainly the fields of sociology, law or economics. Although this fragmentation has enabled each discipline to acquire new insights into criminal phenomena and proposed ways to respond to them, it does not provide a global understanding of how interactions between various levels of implementation lead to (or do not lead to) order, security and justice. The best therapeutic treatment programs may never go beyond the experimental stage because of insurmountable budget constraints or opposing political directions. There is also significant distortion between the principles of regulation as they are publicly stated and the reality of implementation by those who are active in the field and who benefit from an often-underestimated level of autonomy and flexibility. Vulnerable and marginalized groups are often absent from deliberations on policies and practices despite the fact that these people are disproportionately exposed to their effects and that consulting with them or inviting their participation would contribute greatly to the improvement of adopted measures. Likewise, the regulation functions of illegal players remain largely ignored by conventional criminology. Thus, the program enables researchers who are interested in different yet intimately linked and complementary facets of social control to confront these methods and ideas in an environment that is conducive to knowledge hybridization. For example, researchers who study child sex offenders from a psychological perspective and those who map the polycentric regulation of technological crimes combine their micro and macro approaches in order to understand and prevent the online traffic of child pornography.

The Impact of the Program
The impacts of the program are concurrently theoretical, methodological and applied. Theoretically speaking, the program not only facilitates the pursuit of existing knowledge in the six main areas, but also effects the emergence of integrative models adapted to the complexity of contemporary societies. The program promotes methodological innovations. Current capacity for data collection and treatment facilitates the analysis of much broader samples, including entire populations, and allows us to shed light on behaviours or trends that would have been impossible to study in such detail. This "computational" evolution of the social sciences applies naturally to a network-based study of criminal phenomena, in which the ICCC can benefit from international expertise. Finally, the application by police, the justice system, and correctional or community institutions of the knowledge introduced by the Centre's researchers is capable of generating significant societal change in terms of reducing recurrence rates of sexual offenders, preventing the recruitment of high-risk youth by street gangs or dealing more appropriately with victims, to name but a few examples. Thus, the program's relevance is closely linked to its impact, as the knowledge introduced by researchers aims to protect individuals and communities from the widest range of criminal risks while minimizing the negative impacts frequently associated with social control activities such as exclusion, marginalization or the erosion of individual freedoms.