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

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Recidivism in Australia: findings and future research
Adult prisoner self-reported prior offending and imprisonment
In 2001, the AIC conducted the first part of the DUCO study (Makkai and Payne 2003a) which
surveyed 2,135 adult male prisoners on their lifetime offending and drug use histories. The purpose
of the study was to examine the links between drug use and offending within a criminal career and
developmental context. The research was funded by the Australian Government Attorney-Generals
Department under the National Illicit Drug Strategy and was conducted in Queensland, Western
Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. It used an interviewer administered survey where the
prisoners were asked to report how often they had committed property and violent offences in the
six months prior to their incarceration and how often they had been previously imprisoned. Both offence
types were generically defined so that the prisoner could freely interpret which offences they would
include in their self-report. If an offender needed prompting, the interviewer would suggest that
property offences included things like ‘break and enter, selling stolen goods, shoplifting, theft,
forgery, fraud or car theft’. The interviewer prompt for violent offences included ‘assaulting
someone, sex offences, armed robbery, robbery without a weapon or killing someone’.
As discussed, the self-report methodology is advantageous in that it is likely to include a greater
number of offences than are officially recorded, specifically those that the prisoner had committed
but not detected by police. On the other hand, the self-report may be subject to reporting bias,
where the offender intentionally or unintentionally misreports their offending pattern. A key issue
for the interpretation of the DUCO research is whether one prisoner’s idea of what should be
included as a property offence is different from another’s. Should two prisoners have differing
concepts of offending, their self-reported information is also likely to be different.
Additional analysis of the DUCO data suggested that of all adult male prisoners:
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thirty-eight percent report having committed at least one property offence in the six months
prior to their incarceration and 49 percent had committed at least one violent offence
in terms of frequency, 23 percent reported committing property offences and eight
percent reported committing violent offences at least once a week in the six months
prior to their arrest
sixty-three percent reported having been previously imprisoned at least once in their
lifetime, with the average number of imprisonment episodes being three, and an average
of 58 months since the last episode (see table 5).