Seminar in criminology - Discussion 10 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Seminar in criminology - Discussion 10 - Essay Example However, it cannot be determined chiefly by looking at the offender’s arrest data. The drawback is that not all forms of crimes get recorded in official police documents. Nonetheless, by measuring the time that has elapsed until the offender committed another crime is one of the ways of measuring recidivism and has no drawback. Interviewing the offender to establish whether he or she has committed more crimes after enrolling in a probation program is also helpful. The drawback is that the offender may lie. Another way to measure would be to make charts of the new offenses that the offender commits over the amount of time that elapses. Lastly, making an analysis of the criminal events that the offender carries out such as violations, convictions and new arrests is also helpful. The drawback in this case is that not all offenders get arrested based on truthful causes. Burgess found that those offenders who had no favorable items and those who had nine unfavorable items were the ones who were not likely to succeed while on probation (Thistlethwaite & Wooldredge, 2014). On page 294, it is evident that Burgess found that they only had a 45% chance of succeeding (Thistlethwaite & Wooldredge,