Recidivism

Recidivism is one of the most fundamental concepts in criminal justice. It refers to a person's relapse into criminal behavior, often after receiving sanctions or undergoing intervention for a previous crime.

Sanctions are administered by federal, state or local jurisdictions and include all punishments that are available to the jurisdiction, such as fines, forms of community supervision and imprisonment. Interventions are programs such as drug treatment, employment training or cognitive therapies.

An individual recidivates when he or she commits a crime at any time during or after the intervention or sanctioning process.

National Statistics on Recidivism

Bureau of Justice Statistics recidivism studies that surveyed offenders released from prisons in 1983 and 1994 found high rates of recidivism among released prisoners.

• Of the 108,580 prisoners released from prisons in 11 states in 1983, nearly 63 percent were re-arrested within three years, 47 percent were convicted of a new crime, and 41 percent were returned to prison or jail.
• Among nearly 300,000 prisoners released in 15 states in 1994, 68 percent were re-arrested within three years, 47 percent were convicted of a new crime, and 25 percent were recommitted to prison with a new sentence.

Within three years, 52 percent of the released prisoners in the 1994 study were back in prison either because of a new crime or because of a parole violation (such as failing a drug test or missing a parole appointment). This post-prison recidivism was strongly related to arrest history—within three years of their release, 41 percent of prisoners with one prior arrest were re-arrested, but 82 percent of those with more than 15 prior arrests (18 percent of all released prisoners) were re-arrested. [1]

A Core Criminal Justice Concern

Why is recidivism important? Recidivism is an important feature when considering the core criminal justice topics of incapacitation, specific deterrence and rehabilitation. Incapacitation refers to the effect of a sanction to stop people from committing crime by removing the offender from the community. Specific deterrence is the terminology used to denote whether a sanction stops people from committing further crime, once the sanction has been imposed or completed. Rehabilitation refers to the extent to which a program is implicated in the reduction of crime by "repairing" the individual in some way by addressing his or her needs or deficits.

Recidivism rates are often used to measure a program or jurisdiction's performance and to compare jurisdictions and sanctioning processes. Measuring recidivism, however, can pose a formidable data analysis problem that cannot be separated from the issues involved in the measurement of crime.

Recidivism research is embedded throughout NIJ-sponsored research in sentencing, corrections and policy intervention evaluations. Many NIJ-funded studies of community supervision depend on recidivism measurement to inform probation and parole policy.

Recidivism and desistance. An important connection exists between the concept of recidivism and the growing body of research on criminal desistance. Desistance refers to the process by which a person arrives at a permanent state of nonoffending. In effect, an offender released from prison will either recidivate or desist. To the extent that interventions and sanctions affect the process of desistance, the research overlaps.

Desistance is usually measured as a "discrete state," researchers for the National Consortium on Violence Research noted in a 2001 study. They advocated considering desistance to be a developmental process and developed a statistical model for future research. [2]

Evaluating prisons. Recidivism has also been implicated in the performance of prisons and has been used to study the difference between the effectiveness of privately and publicly managed prisons. [3]