Introduction
The rate at which an act is done repeatedly by a given person is termed the recidivism rate. This act is usually preceded by corrective or discouraging attempts on the individual doing the given activity and is often used to apply to crime and penal attempts. Speaking from the habitual use of the term, it can be argued that it’s the rate of apprehension of individuals for the crime committed more than once. Here, the repetitive offenders are subjected to tougher penalties as an attempt to break the habit of committing the given crime and also to discourage others from making the crime a habit. (Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, 2009)
Main Body
The varied ways that the crime repetition is computed include re-apprehension and re-imprisonment among others. Another tool that can be used to compute the same information includes the use of reports on the behavior of the individual from the neighborhood. All these sources need to be subjected to legislation so as to ensure that the computation is accurate in monitoring the re-commission of the crime from records as some go unnoticed and the computation may be affected by falsehood, concealing, and forgetfulness. (National Institute of Justice, 2008)
The argued recidivism rate of 0% is questionable as there is no information given to support the statement and the methods used to arrive at the conclusion. This is so because the record-keeping of crime needs to be accurate with reference to the time interval taken into consideration. This process may require that the available records be in harmony with the information at the grassroots of unreported crimes among other factors that can make the compilation faulty. (Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, 2009)
Further, the reporting authority should be neutral to the justice system so as to avoid professional bias among other misinformation. Also, the fact that there is no accountability of the method used to zero rates the recidivism rate makes the statement further questionable. As a point of argument, the Boot camp training should have been used together with other corrective measures like the use of intermediate houses; detention under supervision, manual labor, and other penal systems to help realize the given situation and which may not have been accounted for in within the interval. (National Institute of Justice, 2008)
To rely on the recidivism rate of 0%, there may be further needed for the collection of the data to be done by different authorities working at the different levels of the society and which may also need to have different interests and focus so as to overcome the risk of falseness, selfishness, and bias that may be geared towards different motives. The data collection system also needs to be much wider-reaching so as to avoid the prejudices and use of assumptions or generalization of information collected from a small group to represent the larger group. (National Institute of Justice, 2008)
Taking into account the time interval that the data is representing should further be accompanied by taking into account the prevailing conditions that may fuel crime. These factors may include the level of unemployment and inflation rates that may have an increasing or decreasing effect on the crime recidivism rate. (Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, 2009)
Conclusion
Taking into account the sensitivity of the study of criminology, extra care needs to be put in the reporting system and channels as the information given are useful in examining the efficiency of the penal systems, and may also be useful in general planning taking into account the safety levels given by the authorities. The information is also useful in planning state funding so as to major in the areas that need further attention. An example of this is the allocation of funds to recruit and employ more penal staff or security staff in the cases of a drop in security levels.
Work Cited
Florida Department of Juvenile Justice. Performance Measurement Reports. 2009. Web.
National Institute of Justice. Measuring Recidivism. 2008. Web.