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

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Recidivism in Australia: findings and future research
Examples from the Australian literature
The importance of time (1)
In an evaluation of the effectiveness of a community corrections officer training course, Trotter
(1995) examined differences in recidivism between offenders supervised by two groups of
community corrections officers: those who participated in the training course (the experimental
group) and those who didn’t (the control group). The offenders were randomly assigned to one
of the two groups in late 1990 and the first recidivism study was conducted in 1992. The results
indicated modest, but significant differences between the groups after 12 months with prisoners
assigned to the experimental group having lower rates of reconviction.
In 1994, Trotter returned to the project to determine whether the experimental group were still
less likely to have been reconvicted than the control group. After 48 months, the reconviction
results suggested that there was now no statistically significant difference between the two
groups in terms of whether they had been reconvicted in court, suggesting that either the
program was generally ineffective in reducing recidivism, or that the effect experienced by
the experimental group was real, but only short-lived.
The importance of time (2)
Coumarelos (1994) examined recidivism for a sample of juveniles who had first been convicted
of an offence in the New South Wales Children’s Court between 1982 and 1986. Recidivism was
measured using Children’s Court conviction data which, because that data only included juvenile
criminal matters, were censored at 18 years of age. The observation period therefore varied for
each individual within the study, depending on how old they were when first convicted. Due to
the variability in the observation period, the study was framed as an examination of the probability
that an offender would be re-convicted in court before the age of 18 years. The results suggested
that the probability of reconviction was small, with approximately 30 percent being reconvicted
for one or more offences in the Children’s Court.
More than ten years later, in 2005, Chen et al. revisited the question of whether juvenile
offenders were likely to have multiple episodes of conviction, but this time extended the
analysis to include court convictions recorded in any criminal court, not just the Children’s
Court. The authors were now no longer dealing with data censored at 18 years of age,
but were able to observe recidivism well into adulthood.
This second study (Chen et al. 2005) was unique in that it challenged the long held belief that
most juveniles do not reappear in court after their first criminal conviction. It found that 68 percent
of those first appearing in 1995 reappeared in a New South Wales criminal court within eight
years. This result was considerably different from the estimated 30 percent in the Coumarelos
study, a difference which has been partly attributed to the lengthier period of observation.