NCJ Number
236378
Journal
Journal of Criminal Justice Volume: 39 Issue: 5 Dated: September/October 2011 Pages: 452-459
Date Published
2011
Length
8 pages
Annotation
This study examined the main and moderating influences of social ecology on recidivism.
Abstract
The study findings provide limited support for the concept that social structural context influences recidivism. Among the neighborhood-level measures, only residential stability maintained a significant (negative) relationship with recidivism. There was no support for the authors' hypothesis related to the moderating influences of social structural contact on recidivism. In fact, the influence of the validated measure of individual risk, i.e., the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) score, on recidivism did not vary significantly across counties, indicating that an individual's personal risk factors tend to influence recidivism uniformly across contexts. Although the study design grounded the analysis in an ecological theoretical perspective, the findings are more consistent with criminal propensity and developmental perspectives that emphasize the importance of individual-level factors for understanding antisocial behavior across the life course. Although the present study was not designed to determine which, if any, specific individual-level theories can account for variation in recidivism in the study sample, the uniform strength of the LSI-R in predicting recidivism across contexts highlights the importance of individual-level factors relative to contextual factors in developing theoretical models of recidivism. The study used hierarchical nonlinear modeling in estimating the effects of concentrated disadvantage, immigrant concentration, and residential stability on recidivism for a sample of offenders released from custody/supervision in 2006 who resided in Iowa's 99 counties. The sample consisted of 5,164 individuals. 3 tables and 73 references