Research project IM/RT/23/DOT (Research action IM)
Recidivism and criminal careers are important policy issues in the context of monitoring and studying public criminal justice policies and their effects. In the course of the last decade, researchers at the NICC have begun to study recidivism and criminal careers based on (dispersed) project funding.
The lack of systematic knowledge and research attention in Belgium led the minister of Justice in 2021 to found a permanent research unit at the NICC, the Research Unit on Recidivism and Criminal Careers (acronym CReCC in Dutch and French), which is operational since 2022. Members of the CReCC make use of different databases in the Justice Department (and beyond), but this remains an important challenge until today, one important reason being the lack of common identifiers between databases (making it very difficult to match individual data across databases), another remains the constant struggles to update data (due to the absence of a systematic approach).
Building upon the use of and links between national conviction records and national detention data in previous BELSPO-financed projects (particularly FAR and IIHA), this project seeks to develop a validated Database on Offender Trajectories (DOT) that will be future-oriented, including developments towards the facile integration of new up-to-date data.
DOT will serve as a permanent research infrastructure for the evaluation of public policies and the study of important subjects related to recidivism and criminal careers (e.g. recidivism or criminal careers after release from prison, …).
In light of extending DOT, a feasibility study based on a SWOT-analysis will be conducted to draw upon DOT for links with non-criminal justice data (medical and social security data), including all the important challenges related to data ownership and the protection of data and privacy (GDPR-compliance).
Furthermore, DOT will provide the validated elements to develop a Recidivism Monitoring Justice Infrastructure with information that will be disseminated to professionals working in criminal justice and to the wider public. Internationally, DOT will be an important instrument for ongoing work towards European comparative recidivism statistics.
