Recidivism research at the NICC

As a (mainly) applied research department, the Criminology Department of the National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology (NICC) has only recently begun addressing questions related to recidivism, since 2011-2012. Although this was largely unplanned, a posteriori several reasons for this shifting research attention to recidivism can be mentioned, including the increased availability of digital data, awareness of a lack of firm descriptive information (e.g. no national recidivism statistics), a lack of feedback information about the effectiveness of the criminal justice system and limitations in the existing recidivism research studies in Belgium (e.g. small selective samples,…). After a first publication in 2012 (see below), much effort has been invested in promoting recidivism studies, leading to an expanding number of publications. In this publication, we provide an introductory discussion of recidivism and present an overview of quantitative recidivism research in Belgium and at the NICC