Essay On Recidivism

Recidivism/repeated offense is the repetition of criminal activity, and it is determined by a prisoner who is released from the prison return to prison for a new offense. Rates of recidivism indicate the amount of released inmates have been rehabilitated, and the degree of severity of the punishments outside the prison. “An estimated 67.5% of prisoners released in 1994 were rearrested within three years, an increase over the 62.5% found for those released in 1983”(Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2014). High rates of recidivism result in enormous costs, in the area of public safety, and high rates of recidivism could lead to disastrous social costs to the communities and the offenders themselves, as well as their families. Hence, the severe punishment in order to reduce the recidivism is necessary, as well as the education for prisoners is important, too.

The idea for general crimes obeys the basic rule that the more severe the law is the fewer criminals exists in the country temporarily. According to the study conducted by M. Keith Chen(2007), by doing a Pearson χ2 test on the security level and prison conditions data provided by the U.S Department of Justice, the results, shows in table 1(Appendix), the harsher the security level is the larger amount of people will be arrested. Furthermore, a sophisticated analysis (Appendix table 2) by Shepherd (2002) clearly shows the more severe punishments do reduces recidivism. Even though the data shows that more severe punishment reduces recidivism by only a small percentage, the severe punishment do have an effective influence on reducing repeat offenders. However, in order to reduce recidivism both reasonably and effectively, an additional approach is needed. A study conducted by Steurer...

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... themselves. People all over the world are same, as long as he/she can think, everybody tends to be a useful person.

As data shows, high school degree is the most common educational need among inmates (Mac Donald 2003). A sophisticated research conducted by Steurer, Smith, and Tracy (2001) shows that the educational program in prison is effective. They found that the prison education reduced the recidivism rate (Appendix Figure 1), and the education program contribute a lot on reducing recidivism. More than 10% lower of the recidivism rate on re-arrest, re-conviction, and re-incarceration areas. However, data may not be very accurate because of the bias of the different characteristics of the participant, but it is still good enough to show education program in prison plays a crucial role in reducing recidivism. So, education program in the prison is important.