The structure of the recidivism (postpenal recidivism)

Postpenal recidivist crime is the indicator of effectiveness of punishment in the form of isolation from the society. It is also an indicator of the release on parole sufficiency, as well as the criteria of successful admonishing of crime in general. Subsequently, it is impossible to study post-penal crime without knowing the essence and internal mechanisms of the constituent elements of postpenal recidivism. The structure is one of the qualitative indicators of postpenal recidivism disclosing its internal features and criminal pathway of the criminal career of a recidivist who served the sentence in correctional institutions. To study the probability of re-committing of crime in the structure of postpenal recidivism based on the character of previous crime, a sampling analysis of 580 cases was made; the cases chosen from those where criminals were imprisoned for the first time in the general regime penal colony in Tomsk and Kemerovo regions and disimprisoned in 2006. The inspection revealed that 55% of those under analysis committed a new crime in the course of the three following years. People who committed postpenal recidivism became the basis for the analysis. The calculated frequency of new crimes shows that previous crimes predetermine the structure of the following postpenal recidivism. In this respect both high rate of specialization of recidivism (90%) and stable possibility of differentiation of the latter (31%) were determined in the recidivism structure that started with theft, robbery and mugging. Recidivism structure starting with intended life and health offences is more differentiated (90%). The transfer to general recidivism is connected with the situational character of the offences, as well as with relatively long confinement, which, in its turn, determines the preferences after the release in terms of lucrative felonious acts helping to provide a recidivist with subsistence. The analysis of discipline in standard regime penal colony shows that future postpenal recidivists intend not to follow the statutory right restriction and standards more than people who have not committed any offences during the three years after discharge. It is necessary to pay attention to the index of people convicted on parole among future postpenal recidivists; this index is 34%, which is 12% more than the same index of people who do not commit postpenal recidivism. This information shows a big quantity of people among future postpenal recidivists who used to temporise and problems of equivalence of estimation of these people's behaviour while making decisions of release on parole.

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