Rajiv Lalla

The Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services is currently at the end of a 5-year strategic plan to improve its operations and fulfilment of its core mandate. This plan comprised of five goals, one of which aims to improve the delivery of correctional services for both community and institutionally-based offenders. Using data for community-based offenders, this study applies the location quotient and shift-share analysis techniques to gain an understanding of the changing offender profile across the province of Ontario. The Risk-Need-Responsivity model of offender classification was quantified to fit the contexts of a spatial analysis of changing offender dimensions of risk, need, responsivity and override from 2004 to 2013. From the findings of this study, the London-Core area showed the slowest and St. Catharines area fastest rates of decline for the highest priority offenders in the Ministry framework. At the regional level, the North area showed concerning trends for the highest risk, and need offenders in the most recent five-year period. The results of this study provide a static snapshot of the offender profile for a defined time period, and indicates the concentration of offenders of a given dimension type along with a relative rate of change along terms of growth or decline. Implications of these findings to theory, policy and method are discussed.