In the past, the Canadian government followed in the footsteps of its American counterpart by enacting “sex offender laws.” Since the 1990s, however, the Canadian criminal justice system has taken a different approach to the issue of sex offender recidivism (SOR), focusing on treatment, rehabilitation, and community risk management. This evidence-based approach has been criticized for not doing enough to prevent convicted offenders from sexually reoffending. This criticism has not been addressed empirically, leaving open the question of whether this Canadian policy shift is associated with changes in the rate of sexual recidivism. The present study uses a meta-analytic framework to look at 185 Canadian-based studies involving over 50,000 offenders, making it possible to combine 226 sexual recidivism rates. After controlling for factors such as follow-up length and the independence of samples, weighted pooled recidivism rates have declined since the 1970s by more than 60%. This trend may have gone unnoticed because it is not related to the year of publication but to the period in which the data were collected.

中文翻译：

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加拿大的性累犯率下降：对 80 年期间性犯罪者累犯率的荟萃分析

过去，加拿大政府追随美国政府的脚步，制定了“性犯罪法”。然而，自 1990 年代以来，加拿大刑事司法系统对性犯罪累犯 (SOR) 问题采取了不同的方法，侧重于治疗、康复和社区风险管理。这种基于证据的方法因在防止已定罪的罪犯再次性犯罪方面做得不够而受到批评。这种批评尚未根据经验得到解决，留下了加拿大政策转变是否与性累犯率变化相关的问题。本研究使用元分析框架来研究涉及 50,000 多名罪犯的 185 项加拿大研究，从而可以合并 226 项性累犯率。在控制了随访时间和样本独立性等因素后，加权合并累犯率自 1970 年代以来下降了 60% 以上。这种趋势可能没有引起注意，因为它与出版年份无关，而是与收集数据的时期有关。