Predicting Recidivism

Recidivism is a drain on the justice system. According to a recent report from the National Audit Office, re-offending by recent ex-prisoners costs the UK economy between £9.5 billion and £13 billion a year. A reduction of just 1 or 2 percent would make a huge difference.

But it's not just a financial problem. Recidivism has a negative impact on all the institutions that have to deal with the consequences of it. And it also has an affect on people - the people who administer our justice system, the offender's friends and family, and, perhaps most importantly, the victims of crime.

Reducing recidivism is a challenging task. There are many programmes in place, and many systems that hold data about their outcomes. Some of these programmes may be effective, and well worth extending or copying, but it is not easy to work out their effectiveness because the data is held across multiple systems and it just doesn't join up.

SAS can help you make sense out of this mass of data. It can by help you predict recidivism so that you can take the correct decisions needed to reduce it.

The information and data is key to the decision making process.

Paul Quander, Director of CSOSA

(Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, Washington, DC)