Samenvatting

The WODC has a long history of research into recidivism and criminal careers. This paper describes this history. To the end, the author discusses what exactly recidivism entails and how research into recidivism has been conducted in the Netherlands. Therefore, the author first focuses on descriptive studies, and secondly on evaluation studies in which recidivism is used as an outcome measure. Finally, this paper discusses the directions in which research into recidivism will have to focus on the coming years in order to better meet the wishes of policy makers and to provide more insight into the effectiveness of judicial policy.