About CRPOI
Who We Are
The Centre for Research into the Processes, Outcomes, and Impacts of Incarceration (CRPOI) brings together a membership of over 200 individuals. Our national interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral network of researchers, non governmental advocacy organizations, and experts with lived experience of incarceration form a connected research community that works to increase evidence about the impacts of incarceration in Canada on individuals, families, communities, and on society.
Our Approach
CRPOI works to increase robust research about incarceration through supporting community engaged and participatory action research, and mobilizing research into policy space. We center meaningful engagement with impacted populations, while encouraging knowledge mobilization, especially working to ensure research informs policy and legislative change related to incarceration in Canada.
Advancing Best Practices in Community Engaged Research
Widespread stigmas, social and economic barriers prevent criminalized and incarcerated peoples from meaningfully participating in research that is being conducted about them. CRPOI is committed to encouraging community engaged and community driven research. We provide several leadership opportunities as a mechanism to support positive social engagement for criminalized peoples; this includes leadership through our Expert Advisor Roster, an amazing list of individuals who researchers and ngo’s can connect with to participate in research teams.
Driving Research That Informs Change
In Canada, there is a longstanding history of public and governmental discourses about crime that are rooted in fear, misinformation, stigma, and hyper-individualized focuses. There is very little research about the structural and social impacts of incarceration. CRPOI connects researchers and research teams to pressing systemic, legislative, and policy issues, encouraging academic inquiry to adopt structural lenses, and to focus on research that helps Canadian policy makers to understand the impacts and outcomes of incarceration.
Mobilizing Research
Many researchers across Canada are conducting important research about incarceration, yet too often, this research often exists in silos. We work to connect researchers to other researchers, to the populations who are impacted by it, to advocacy organizations who need evidence to advance their goals, and to legislative and policy spaces.
Centering Impacted Populations
CRPOI works to center impacted populations, ensuring that people who have lived through incarceration are connected to researchers studying it.
National Expert Advisory Roster
CRPOI members access our National Expert Advisory Roster. The roster connects members to a list of individuals with lived experience of criminalization, who bring expertise related to incarceration, community release, and Participatory Action Research.
Expert Advisors bring a range of individual interests, expertise and training. Researchers can connect with them to support research and advising research initiatives.
Members can receive support to build research budgets that include advisory components, and be connected to the experts who can provide advisory services! Expert advisors any and all aspects of research, from design and planning, through to study processes and knowledge sharing.