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

What is the target population for the study?
Recidivism, in its absolute sense, refers to any and all repeated criminal events over the life
course. A study of absolute recidivism would therefore require information about all offences
ever committed by all individuals for all the years they were alive and able to offend. However,
rarely is the question of recidivism so broad that it requires following all offenders all of the time.
Instead, policy makers, practitioners and researchers are usually more interested in assessing
recidivism amongst particular population groups or samples.
Take a hypothetical example. Suppose that a policy maker in the New South Wales corrective
services sector was interested in the effectiveness of a prison-based sex offender treatment
program. Effectiveness in this research was to be defined as the extent to which the treatment
program prevented post-release sex offending. The criteria, for selecting the sample would
include a range of limiting factors – including the geographical and operational location of the
program being evaluated. In undertaking the project, the researcher would have little reason
to examine the recidivism of community-based drug treatment participants in Queensland,
because firstly, this is not a study of drug treatment participants. Secondly, it is an assessment
of prison-based treatment, not community-based treatment, and thirdly, offenders in Queensland
are not assumed to be the same as their NSW counterparts. By asking the question specific
to a NSW prison-based sex offender treatment program, the researcher must endeavour to
select a sample that matches, as closely as possible, the criteria of the program to be evaluated,
otherwise the results would provide limited information to answer the question as originally
asked by the policy maker.
As noted earlier, the target group may be selected according to a range of criteria, including
demographic characteristics, prior offending profiles, prior contact with the criminal justice
system, participation in a particular program, geographic location and time period, and rarely
are these criteria mutually exclusive. A single recidivism study may specify any number of
different combinations of these criteria when selecting the target group, for example, juveniles
in Sydney who were involved in a juvenile diversion program in 2004. Moreover, studies using
one set of criteria may, in fact, inadvertently invoke other criteria. An example of this is an
evaluation of a drug court program where recidivism is used to measure program effectiveness.
The sample selection seems relatively straight forward – namely the completion of the drug
court program. However, participation in this program is subject to a variety of important
eligibility criteria that results in a highly specific index event. In the North Queensland Drug
Court, for example, it is a requirement of participation that an offender:
•
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be assessed as drug dependent and willing to undertake abstinence based drug treatment
be referred for offences not including a violent offence
Key elements of recidivism
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