Abstract
The potential of terrorists to re-offend after their release from prison is of much concern in many countries around the world. Yet, there is little research on terrorist recidivism, and risk factors that might contribute to it, as data concerning released offenders of terrorism is scarce. In this chapter, we investigate terrorist recidivism using a large dataset of offenders identified as “security offenders”, which are related to terrorism in Israel, in the years 2004–2017. While the overall rate of recidivism of this cohort is lower than the Israeli criminal recidivism rate, some risk factors affect security offenders similarly to other criminals. While some risk factors known to affect criminal recidivism, such as affiliation to criminal organizations and age, show similar patterns for terrorist recidivism, factors such as length of incarceration and type of crime, show different trends. We discuss the role of these factors within the Israeli and global context.
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Notes
- 1.
According to information presented in the annual Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (TE-STAT) published by Europol, the average sentence lengths in countries such as the UK, Germany, and France range from 4–9 years depending on the year of the report. Sentences for terrorism offences are notoriously short in fact (Chesney 2007), and can be made shorter based on the offence stemming from a sting operation (Norris 2019), or conviction stemming from plead bargaining (De Kerchove and Höhn 2016).
- 2.
While the Palestinian Authority sometimes denies such claims, the Arabic website for the Commission of Detainees and ex-Detainees Affairs includes links to laws and regulations concerning payments to detainees and former detainees, as well as exclusive job advertisements which include being a former detainee as a pre-requisite for application. See http://cda.gov.ps/
- 3.
Polls conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) consistently show that support for violence and armed struggle is consistently greater in “villages/towns/cities” as well as “refugee camps” than it is in “the West Bank”. The results of the polls can be found at http://pcpsr.org/en/node/154.
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Carmel, T., Wolfowicz, M., Hasisi, B., Weisburd, D. (2020). Terrorist Recidivism in Israel: Rates, Patterns and Risk Factors. In: Weisburd, D., Savona, E.U., Hasisi, B., Calderoni, F. (eds) Understanding Recruitment to Organized Crime and Terrorism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36639-1_4
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