Working it Out Estimating the Social Value of Build Up Saskatoon - Marc-André Pigeon

With the current investment5 of $300,000 from the Government of Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Immigration and Career Training during the study period, we found a return on investment of $1.39 for every dollar invested in BUS. [...] The mathematical symbol “∑” is an operator that sums the values associated with each of the 13 participants, represented by the subscript ‘i.’ The variable p0 is the probability of a participant experiencing re-contact i with the criminal justice system, while Ni represents BUS participant ‘N’ and the lowercase ‘c’ represents costs related to policing and corrections per person. [...] Under the actual state (i.e., with the presence of BUS programming), the costs related to the criminal justice system mirror the costs outlined in Equation (1) with one main difference: namely, an expected decrease in the probability a person will continue to have contact with the criminal justice system. [...] It is calculated as summing the product of the proportion of BUS participants who received government assistance in the past (k0 ) times the number of BUS participants (Ni), then multiplied by the cost of i assistance per individual (a). [...] In other words, if BUS did not exist, we assume the government would have continued to provide this kind of financial support to these six individuals.27 According to BUS data, only one of the nine BUS participants who received social assistance continue to receive some kind of government support, meaning that the proportion of BUS participants that continue to be eligible to receive the governmen.