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

Key elements of recidivism
In contrast, where a study is tasked with measuring the success of a drug intervention
program aimed at reducing drug-related offending for example, the fact that the program
participants subsequently commit a minor traffic offence may not be relevant. For this type
of study, a more appropriate indicator of the success of the program may be whether the
participants commit further drug related offences after program completion.
The definitional choices will, by and large, be determined by the purpose of the research
and the context in which it takes place. However, while there are usually sound reasons
for choosing between a generic or a specific approach, the results are likely to be quite
different. To return to the sex offender study: a research approach based on a generic
definition of reoffending will probably produce significantly higher recidivism levels than
a study that opts for an approach which focuses on only one type of sexual offence.
Any attempt to compare results across these studies would be inappropriate. Although this
seems intuitive and straightforward, the results of both studies may be discussed generally
as ’recidivism of sex offenders‘ with little accounting for the differences in the definition
of the offences being used to measure that recidivism.
What is included and excluded in the measurement of recidivism is particularly pertinent
to studies that use a typological approach, where a group of offences are, in combination,
considered to represent a common latent offence typology. Common examples are property
offences, violent offences, serious offences or indictable offences. As noted, in each case,
a number of discrete offence types are counted as an event of recidivism within the banner
of the broader offence typology. For example, an offender will be considered to have committed
a property offence if they are convicted of stealing, shoplifting, break and enter, motor vehicle
theft, property damage, or fraud.
The difficulty posed by this approach is that it can be difficult to discern what individual offence
types are included within the one typology and whether the inclusions and exclusions differ
between studies. If they differ, then the capacity to compare the studies and interpret the
differences may be compromised. A common example in criminology is the classification
of robbery, where theft from a person with or without the use of a weapon is classified by
law as a violent offence. Some criminologists on the other hand, argue that it is the offender’s
motivation – which, in the case of robbery, is property acquisition – that should be used as
the primary classification tool. As a result of this conceptual variation, some studies may
count robbery as a property offence while others count it as a violent offence.
39