“Context Is to Data What Water Is to a Dolphin”*: Social-Historical Conditions, Criminal Histories, and Recidivism Across Five Prisoner Cohorts

Abstract

Understanding offending patterns over the life-course has been a key feature of criminological thought and scholarship since the discipline’s inception. Recent research has brought forth new thinking into how social-historical conditions may influence correlates of crime as well as offending patterns across different eras. Missing from this line of research has been the extent to which rates of recidivism are also affected by social-historical conditions. This paper examines the characteristics and recidivism patterns of five national-level prisoner release cohorts between 1983 and 2012. Results show that criminal histories and recidivism prevalence is very similar across these cohorts spanning over a quarter of a century.