Recidivism is measured by criminal acts that resulted in rearrest, reconviction or return to prison with or without a new sentence during a three-year period following the person's release.
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 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 person who committed a crime 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.
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 individual 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. [1]
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. [2]
National Statistics on Recidivism
Bureau of Justice Statistics studies have found high rates of recidivism among persons who are released from prison. Examines the recidivism patterns of the formerly incarcerated during a 9-year follow-up period.[3] The researchers found that:
- The 401,288 individuals incarcerated in state facilities released in 2005 had 1,994,000 arrests during the 9-year period, an average of 5 arrests per individual released from incarceration. Sixty percent of these arrests occurred during years 4 through 9.
- An estimated 68% of released person released from prison were arrested within 3 years, 79% within 6 years, and 83% within 9 years.
- Eighty-two percent of those arrested during the 9-year period were arrested within the first 3 years.
- Almost half (47%) of incarcerated individuals who did not have an arrest within 3 years of release were arrested during years 4 through 9.
- Forty-four percent of persons released from prison were arrested during the first year following release, while 24% were arrested during year-9.