Recidivism Rate
In the context of criminal justice, recidivism represents a relapse of criminal activity by a person after being convicted of some offense, punished, and corrected (seemingly) (Maltz, 2001). Recidivism emerges from a series of failures, namely, failure to meet the expectations of society or society's failure to support the person; the person's resultant failure to keep away from trouble; the individual's failure to escape capture and conviction, following committing of offense; individual's failure as a correctional-institute inmate to make the most of correctional interventions -- or the institute's failure to provide rehabilitation programs; and the person's additional failures in refraining from criminal activities following release from the institute (Maltz, 2001).
Recidivism Definitions
Recidivism, when taken from a correctional perspective, has a fairly explicit meaning. The term derives from Latin recidere, which implies 'falling back' (Maltz, 2001). Recidivists are individuals who are not rehabilitated following release from confinement (due to committing an offense). Instead, they fall back, i.e. revert, to their former behavior, committing further offenses. While the above conceptual definition for recidivism seems rather straightforward, a more operational one, which allows measurement, is somewhat complex (Maltz, 2001).
The data on which recidivism measurement bases itself is seldom comprehensive, and even in the event that complete information can be obtained, data analysis methods are inconsistent: substantial variation exists in recidivism measurement techniques (National Advisory Commission, 1973: 512).
2.1. Complete information
Firstly, let us consider recidivism measurement when comprehensive data is available. Complete information means that all offenses the individual in question has committed (whether or not arrested for all of them) are known to evaluators. This improbable condition also poses a challenge- the term 'crime' covers many things (Maltz, 2001).
A child-molesting individual, for instance, may be detained, found guilty, and sentenced to some correctional intervention designed exclusively for treating such offenders. He may, after release, be actually corrected, and may stop molesting kids (Maltz, 2001). However, if he turns to other forms of crime, say forgery or armed robbery, can he be considered a recidivist? If taken from one view, he may be labeled a recidivist as, after release, he engaged in criminal behavior. But, this crime is completely different; while the original offense has been curbed, he has resorted to some other harmful behavior. Must such an individual, who moves from one type of crime to another, entirely different one, be considered recidivist (Maltz, 2001)?
We can, of course, label an individual as recidivist if he/she only repeats the same type of offense for which he/she was found guilty originally (Maltz, 2001). This definition, however, suggests that offenders specialize in one crime -- a contradiction to the evidence available and emerging (Petersilia, 1980; Chaiken & Chaiken, 1982; Goldstein, 1982; Miller & Dinitz, 1982). Moreover, a separate recidivism category for individual offenses will correspondingly lead to less information on individual categories (Maltz, 2001). The four categories of crime - personal, white-collar, property, and public-order- may be considered. However, no well-defined lines divide these categories, as many crimes (for instance arson or robbery) may overlap, supersede or magnify the acts (Maltz, 2001).
In order to understand the full impact of 'return to crime' and the time in which the probability is highest, one needs to categorize the re-imprisoned convicts, the most probable reason and time in which such recurrence is seen and the gender influence of the phenomenon.
Four Measures of Recidivism
Langan and Levin (2002) performed analysis on data gathered from Bureau of Justice Statistics about female inmates released from state prison in 1994. In their research, they focused on four measures of recidivism namely re-arrest; reconviction; and resentence (with & without new sentence) (Deschenes, Owen, Crow, 2007). The sample size of 272,111, comprising both male and female prisoners, was used for research. Rigorous analysis of this sample showed that, within 3 years of prisoner's release (Deschenes, Owen, Crow, 2007):
67.5% were rearrested
46.9% were reconvicted
25.4% were resentenced
51.8% were sent back to prison due to new crime or technical violation.
These statistics of combined data set (both male and female) showed that the crimes which had highest re-arrest rates were (Deschenes, Owen, Crow, 2007):
Robbery (70.2%);
Burglary (74%);
Larcenists (74.6%);
Motor vehicle theft (78.8%);
Possession/selling stolen property (77.4%);
Charges due to some form of weapons (70.2%).
While lowest re-arrest rates were of the prisoners which were originally imprisoned for (Deschenes, Owen, Crow, 2007):
Homicide (40.7%);
Rape (46%);
Other sexual assaults (41.1%)
Driving under the influence (51.5%).
Another important factor which Langan and Levin analyzed is the number of prisoners...
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