Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. A tendency to recidivate.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. Committing new offenses after being punished for a crime.
- n. Chronic repetition of criminal or other antisocial behavior.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. The state or quality of being recidivous; relapse
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Relapse into crime; the conduct or condition of a recidivist.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- n. habitual relapse into crime
Etymologies
Examples
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The very least we can do to reduce recidivism is not slap a penalty on to people the moment they are released.
Drinking alcohol is not a crime, even for prisoners on parole
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The statistics on what is called recidivism, i.e. sliding back into old eating and exercise patterns, are clear.
Judith J. Wurtman, PhD: Overeating Flare-Ups: Are They the Cause of Chronic Obesity?
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What we know about recidivism is around the age of 30 or so, most males, which are predominately the people in these systems, drop in terms of their risk.
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Of course, recidivism is high, so three strikes and out laws move people to life sentences.
Why Aren’t There More Old Criminals? - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com
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And really to get a long-term recidivism study, it's going to take maybe two, three, four years to be able to track people.
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The latter solves the problem of recidivism and the former, well, isn’t really recidivism, is it?
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And what really impresses me is that perfect use of recidivism, which is a great word that I can never seem to work into a conversation.
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The judge also observed that in this case there was no likelihood of recidivism, that is, of repeating this kind of activity.
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Q Geoff, when these numbers have been released in the past, there's been discussion among critics that, actually -- that this should not be titled recidivism, but that, possibly, some of these individuals may have turned to terrorist activities as a result of the treatment or their detention at Guantanamo -- in order words, that they may have -- not have had these inclinations prior to having arrived there.
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UPDATE 2: Check out the hilarious Cully Stimson (the ex-DOD lawyer who tried to get corporate America to fire their law firms for working on Gtmo cases, and got fired himself, in Jan. 2007) commenting in the LA Times (scroll down to end) on the "recidivism" rate being too low to be credible.
Shayana Kadidal: New York Times Re-runs Retracted Story on Guantanamo Detainees' "Return to Terror"
kiltwraith commented on the word recidivism
repeated or habitual relapse, as into crime.
March 18, 2009