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

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30 Recidivism in Australia: findings and future research A more significant source of overestimation occurs in those studies which consider any re-entry to prison or community supervision as evidence of fresh offending. An offender need not be convicted of or sentenced for an offence to be incarcerated or placed under supervision. The classic situation is where an offender is remanded into custody or placed on supervised bail either at the time arrest or at some stage during the court case, but is subsequently acquitted and released. There is also the problem that the same individual may be remanded but then released on bail numerous times during the processing of a case. If each remand episode is counted as recidivism, this will significantly overestimate the level of reoffending. Misrepresenting time As the final step in the chronology of the criminal justice system, episodes of imprisonment or community based orders, when imposed as part of a sentence, inevitably commence some time after a conviction in court because sentencing is often adjourned by the court to a later date. The date of admission into custody may therefore occur months, or even years after the offence was committed. This is particularly the case if an appeal is lodged. In some situations, where an offender has been sentenced to imprisonment, but appeals that sentence, the court may release them pending the outcome of their appeal. The obvious exception to this rule is remand, where an offender will be recorded as entering custody or community supervision well before they are convicted. In fact, for defendants who have been arrested and refused both police and court bail, the remand episode will more closely coincide with the date of the first court hearing rather than the last. Illustration Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each criminal justice data source is important in understanding the criminal justice concept of recidivism. However, with so many complex issues to consider (including others that are not highlighted here) it is sometimes difficult to conceptualise how each data system really affects capacity to identify criminal events. To tie this together, this section describes a hypothetical recidivism study that seeks to examine the extent to which 100 newly released prisoners commit new offences within two years of their release. Figure 4 depicts the post-release offending behaviour of just one of these offenders. The figure includes five arrows travelling from left to right, each indicating the number of offending episodes committed by the offender according to five different data sources. The first is a measure of total actual offending, represented by self-reported data. The second is measured using police apprehension data, followed by court appearance data, court conviction data and finally, sentenced imprisonment data as recorded by the corrective services agency.
Key elements of recidivism According to this hypothetical example, the offender experiences ten new offending episodes in the first two years after release. There may have been offence episodes that were not self-reported, but for the purposes of this illustration it is assumed that the self-reported information is accurate. Of these ten offences episodes, only five result in an apprehension by the police – perhaps the other five were not reported to the police, were investigated but were not solved, or they occurred in another jurisdiction. Note also that the offence episode need not be recorded as an apprehension at the same time it was committed (as indicated by the change in the position of the offences along the time scale), and some offence episodes may be recorded out of the order in which they were actually committed. Of the five offence episodes recorded as an apprehension, only three result in a court appearance. Perhaps the other two matters were dropped at the pre-court stage due to insufficient evidence, or, particularly in the case of juveniles, the matter may have been diverted to a family conference. Finally, only two of the three court appearances result in a conviction and only one of those convictions carries a prison sentence. This depiction of recidivism using different data sources illustrates the attrition that occurs at consecutive stages of the criminal justice system. It also illustrates how different data sources may affect our understanding of an individual’s recidivist behaviour. Consider what might be concluded about the frequency and timing of recidivism using each data source. The self-reported data indicate that the offender returned to offending almost immediately after being released from prison and was most prolific during the first twelve months. The police apprehension data suggest that the individual reoffended after approximately six months, and was most prolific during the second year. The court appearance and conviction data suggest that the offender did not reoffend until some time in the second year and was by no means as prolific as suggested in the self-report. Finally, while the offender was subsequently imprisoned for one of the ten self-reported offence episodes, their reimprisonment did not occur until after the second year, and thus would not be identified as recidivism in this study. 31
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Research and Public Policy Series N
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