What is recidivism?
Over the past six years, shifting priorities in the state’s crime policy have increasingly stressed protection of public safety as a primary goal, imposing stricter mandates and policies on criminal justice agencies. The serious and increasingly severe consequences imposed through the state’s criminal sentencing laws are meant to provide a deterrent to crime. Incarceration protects the public from offenders for a period of time. Eventually, however, nearly all inmates return to the community — most within three years. Community supervision becomes an important public safety measure providing oversight of offenders released from prison and those never sent to prison. Finally, the state funds and provides a network of community- and prison-based treatment, education, and rehabilitative programs for pre-trial and convicted offenders, which can offer alternatives to future criminal activity. In its broadest sense, recidivism can be defined as a public safety failure rate. Recidivism, more
