The dangerous offender provisions: Are they targeting the right offenders?

Abstract

In order to deal with very high risk, violent offenders, the Criminal Code (CC) provides for the indeterminate incapacitation of these offenders. The dangerous offender (DO) provisions of the CC have been in force since 1977 and the courts have declared only 204 offenders as DO’s. One of the intentions of the DO provisions was to target nonsexual offenders in addition to sex offenders, a criticism of the earlier dangerous sexual offender legislation. There was also criticism that the DO provisions may not target the truly dangerous offender. The present study compared 64 DO’s to a known group of violent offenders (n = 32) on a range of variables. The DO’s showed many similarities to the comparison group of violent offenders suggesting that the DO’s represent a potentially violent group. However; the majority of DOs are comprised of sex offenders. In addition, objective risk scales may have limited use with the present DO population because the scales were not developed with sex offenders in mind. Nevertheless, steps to improve the identification of dangerous offenders are suggested by the research.