Criminology professor Jessica Evans receives 2025 Partnership Engage Grant funding
Criminology professor Jessica Evans has been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Engage Grant (PEG) (external link) . She is a community-engaged scholar whose research examines the causes, conditions, and consequences of incarceration in Canada, framed through anti-racist, decolonial, abolitionist and critical political economic theories.
Evans is the co-founder of the Toronto Prisoners’ Rights Project and is certified through the Walls to Bridges program.
Evans’ past work includes a project that looks at the barriers stopping Ontario from using restorative justice for sexual harm cases. She supports a large research project funded by the SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, which studies the impact of disasters and crises on people in prison. In a separate study, she explored how COVID-19 affected individuals in Ontario's prisons.
The SSHRC PEG offers short-term, targeted funding to support collaborative research projects aimed at informing decision-making within a specific partner organization in the public, private, or non-profit sector. These grants are designed to address urgent needs and time-sensitive challenges faced by organizations outside of academia.
The current PEG funding will support the hiring of a research assistant for Evans’ new project, which looks to explore different crisis interventions using community-led solutions that focus on non-medical help, without involving the police. “At a time when political discourse is increasingly agitating for involuntary and mandatory crisis treatment, which lack rigorous supporting evidence, this grant is an important step in the direction of supporting humane, evidence-based, rights-centred and holistic crisis-intervention practices,” shared Evans.
Many individuals in crisis often deal with several challenges at once, such as mental health issues, substance use, financial problems, and social isolation. Crises often put racialized and disabled people at greater risk of being hurt or killed during police interactions. Although police are not trained to respond to mental health or substance use issues, Ontario continues to enforce measures such as involuntary treatment programs instead of evidence-based, rights-centred interventions.
This research project is in collaboration with the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Health Equity and Community Wellbeing (CERC HECW) at Toronto Metropolitan University and the Gerstein Crisis Centre (GCC). The project seeks to create lasting change by strengthening non-medical crisis interventions and promoting alternatives that prioritize dignity, autonomy, and harm reduction.
The partnered study hopes to improve knowledge of non-medical crisis interventions and highlight effective community-based alternatives. This multi-stage project's first phase will build an evidence base for crisis interventions that don't involve police, identify the key characteristics of successful non-medical crisis response models, collate existing evidence on the purported harms and benefits of involuntary treatment, and analyze internal data from the GCC to better understand the experiences of people who access non-medical crisis services. The partnership between CERC HECW and GCC is rooted in shared decision-making, knowledge exchange, and a commitment to advancing equitable mental health care.
The team is holding a one-day community round table to launch the final report in Spring 2026, and it is anticipated that the academic articles will be published in the summer or fall of 2026. A podcast episode featuring a dialogue between Evans and Susan Davis, director of the Gerstein Crisis Centre, will be recorded with Disability Dialogues and released in Fall 2025.