Comparing Official Measures of Recidivism in Juvenile Justice

Recidivism is a foundational concept that represents the continued criminal behavior after system contact. Evidence suggests that how recidivism is operationalized can produce varying estimates of recidivism, yet this disparity has not been estimated within the juvenile justice system. This study examined — through event history analysis — whether using different official measures of recidivism produced disparate estimates of recidivism. This study compared the hazards of recidivism among three unique operational definitions of recidivism – offense date, referral date, and adjudication date – among a cohort of 10,830 juvenile offenders from a large southern state. Two hypotheses were tested – (a) the use of different operational definitions of recidivism produces disparate recidivism hazards and (b) the use of different operational definitions of recidivism produces disparate effects across the correlates of recidivism. The results suggest that official measures of juvenile recidivism produce significantly different hazard estimates and the operational definition of recidivism had significant effects on the correlations between the recidivism measure and predictor variables among juvenile offenders.