Recidivism in Australia : findings and future research - Australian ...

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Recidivism in Australia: findings and future research
There are numerous instances in Australia where recidivism research has had a significant
impact on both policy and program development. One example is the AIC’s work on the
Queensland drug court program which analysed reoffending as a measure of program
effectiveness (Makkai & Veraar 2003; Payne 2005). The research results were used to justify
the implementation of the drug court program as a permanent fixture in the Queensland
criminal justice system. Another example is the longitudinal study by the New South Wales
Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) on juvenile offending trajectories.
Until recently the conventional wisdom, as supported by earlier research findings, was that
only a small number of juvenile offenders come back into contact with the court system.
However, this new research by BOCSAR produced results that challenge this belief.
It has the potential to change the landscape of juvenile justice policy in Australia.
Finally, the AIC’s research on recidivist offenders in the ACT examined the reoffending
behaviour of that jurisdiction’s most prolific property offenders (Makkai et al. 2004).
The results were used to shape local operational policing practices – in particular, targeted
strategies for high volume offenders – and the ACT’s property crime reduction strategy.
What is recidivism?
The term recidivism originates from the Latin recidere, which means to fall back. It is often
used interchangeably with others such as repeat offending or reoffending. In the criminological
literature it has been variously described as ‘the reversion of an individual to criminal behaviour’
(Maltz 1984: 1), the ‘return of a prisoner to custody’ (SCRGS 2006), the ‘reappearance of a
juvenile in court’ (Victoria. Department of Human Services 2001) or the, ‘reconviction of a drug
court participant’ (Payne 2005). Although the technical elements of each definition may vary,
there is one common theme that underpins them – recidivism is generally used for describing
repetitious criminal activity, and a recidivist offender is an individual who engages in such
activity. It is these offenders who are the subject of much debate as they have become
variously described throughout the literature as ‘chronic’, ‘multiple’, ‘frequent’, or ‘prolific’
offenders, among others.
It is not a new concept in criminology although, for the reasons mentioned earlier, it has
gained greater prominence in more recent times. One of the earliest and most frequently
cited recidivism studies was conducted in Philadelphia in 1972 (Wolfgang, Figlio & Sellin
1972). The authors used a longitudinal cohort methodology with official police arrest data
to measure the frequency of offending among nearly 10,000 males born in 1945. The authors
found that by the age of 18, only 35 percent (n=3,475) had been arrested by the police at
least once, but that these offenders had accounted for more than 10,000 episodes of arrest,
giving an average of almost three arrests per offender.