Recidivism and Motivation
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The United States has the highest recidivism rates in the entire world. Recidivism happens when a previously convicted person recommits crimes and lands themselves back into the criminal justice system (Biggers, 2024). A 2021 Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that in 24 states approximately 66% of people who were released from prison were re-arrested within three years of their release. This re-arrest rate increases to over 80% within 10 years of release (Biggers, 2024). Evidently, recidivism is a massive problem within the United States. The question that begs to be answered is why? What makes convicted criminals want to reoffend? What motivational factors entice them to commit crimes again? In this blog post, we explore the different motivational theories that could explain why people end up reoffending and what can be done to reduce the recidivism rate.
Incentives of Criminality
Patterns of criminality that signal recidivism are very tricky to predict, a problem prevalent today known as “the prediction problem.” Although the Pew Center’s Risk and Needs Assessment identifies 7 risk factors, those being “antisocial personality patterns, pro-criminal attitudes, social supports for crime (peers who are engaged in crime), substance abuse, poor family or marital relationships, school and/or work failure, and lack of pro-social recreational activities,” there are major problems when applying these factors in predicting future crime (Walker, 2015, p. 83). These factors help determine who is likely to reoffend, but issues arise when attempting to accurately use them in analyzing a particular individual. For example, law enforcement officers believe they “know a career criminal when they see one,” but this doesn’t appear to be the case. In the Rand Inmate Study (RIS), researchers used a criminal self-report method to compare with the predictions of law enforcement officers. Results found that predictions were incorrect 49%, nearly half, of the time. In fact, 7% of predictions were grossly wrong (predicted high-rate offenders turned out to be low-rate offenders and vice versa) while the other 42% were moderately wrong (predicted medium rate offenders turned out to be low or high-rate offenders and vice versa) (Walker, 2015, p. 92-93). While it is difficult on an individual level to determine whether one person will reoffend, we can still analyze crime patterns and notice how certain motivating factors influence criminal decision making on a grander scheme.
It is widely believed that to prevent crime, we must deter criminals from reoffending. This means that the perception of deterrence in an area is likely to determine how one perceives their own likelihood of arrest. In a study conducted by Barnes et al. (2024), they wondered if arrests play a role in the criminal decision-making process and wanted to determine how initial arrests, age, and social bonds influence decisions. They predicted that older individuals, people with more social bonds, or with a conviction/criminal record would perceive higher risks. Although they found that perceived detention risk increases from adolescence (18 years old) to adulthood (final interview at 38 years old), this increase was substantially trivial (4% average increase). This is because many participants reported an increase in detection risk which each phase, while some others report the exact opposite, perceiving a decrease in detection over time. They had also found that, according to a time-stable measure, the perceived costs were higher when thinking about family but not statistically significant with peers. This meant that the personal risk of losing family is not something that changes within a person over time. Meanwhile, according to a time-varying measure, respondents reported higher risk of detection during times when there was a spike in perceived cost from friends.
The relationship between an individual and their friends or family in this case would be an incentive for one to stay away from criminal behavior as they wouldn’t want to damage a good relationship. Incentive Theory states that “an incentive is an environmental event that attracts or repels a person toward or away from initiating a particular court of action” (Reeve, 2018, p 101). This attraction or repellant effect is mediated by operant conditioning, or when a particular behavior is followed up by a reward or a consequence. In this case, Barnes et al. (2024) believed that arrests would increase the perception of detention risk, however, the positive association they found failed to reach statistical significance. It seems here that the deterrence effect, a negative incentive to stay away, didn’t work as expected. Instead, the research team found that familial and friendly bonds were the most important incentives for staying away from committing crimes. To put this into perspective, the situational cue of a friend threatening to abandon you if you carry out a crime (drunk driving for example), would likely lead to a behavioral response of choosing to avoid said act (requesting an Uber), ending with a likely consequence of a strengthened friendship that remains in-tact.
But what about the incentives to commit crime? Bouncing off the idea that social bonds reduce crime, having lower social bonds should increase crime, specifically pro-social bonds. In fact, having more antisocial friends is associated with a higher likelihood of endorsing criminal behavior. This is because peers are higher predictors for influencing risk taking behaviors despite the family values that are taught at home (Varghese et al., 2024). When hanging out with risk taking peers, there are more social incentives to these experiences which may reduce the perception of a risk at all. If an offender perceives low risk of detention while perceiving a personal benefit to committing a certain crime, there is a chance that a crime could take place. For example, in a temporal consistency study on crime patterns conducted by Sabine et al. (2020), research prior to their study suggested that offenders often remain relatively stable in location as they are usually aware of the “spatial distribution of attractive targets” in their immediate area (p. 864). This matches up with their results as they found that offenses committed by the same offender were often committed at similar hours of the day, during similar hours of the week, with stronger consistency for the same type of crime, especially between offenders with 2+ arrests already. The similar timing of offenses can be due to regular patterns in human behavior because of their weekly schedules. Meanwhile, the consistency in location is affected by the familiarity of the area, including where suitable targets are located. If you think about the crime show stereotype that offenders always eventually return to the scene of the crime, then this study resonates with that idea very well.
Growth-Fixed Mindset and Recidivism
When it comes to the behaviors associated with recidivism, a major motivational theory is that of the growth-fixed mindset. The growth-fixed mindset reflects how people assess their personal qualities as something that is either in their control or out of their control. These personal qualities include their intelligence and personality attributes. First, let’s analyze the fixed mindset. A person with a fixed mindset believes that their personal qualities are fixed and cannot be changed. These persisting ideas that their personal qualities are fixed results in feeling that they are set and cannot be changed no matter the amount of effort that is put in to change it (Reeve, 2018, p. 212). For example, a person with this mindset is more inclined to believe that each person has a physical entity that lies within them such as a smart brain or a creative touch (Reeve, 2018, p. 212). On the flip side, there are people who adopt the growth mindset. People with a growth mindset believe that personal attributes can be changed through effort and determination. They believe that an individual can grow, increase, or strengthen any of their personal qualities (Reeve, 2018, p. 212). Effort is a valuable asset for people who have adopted the growth mindset. These people will put in more effort to improve themselves when given negative feedback, such as receiving a bad grade on a presentation or, in our case, an arrest (Reeve, 2018, p 213). Within the growth mindset, learning and growing is the process of life. Inherently, this mindset is much more hopeful than the fixed mindset. With the growth mindset, no person is beyond help. As long as they can put forth the effort, they can change.
Substantial social science research indicates that people who recidivate most likely have a fixed mindset. In the scholarly article “Child Psychopathy and Protective Factors: IQ and Motivation to Change,” the researchers found evidence to support this hypothesis. This article details how they studied cognitive factors in juvenile delinquents and development pathways to committing crimes. In addition, motivation to change for juveniles was another important factor for this study (Salekin, 2010). The study found that juveniles who displayed higher motivation to change were less likely to offend than the juveniles who displayed lower rates of motivation to change (Salekin, 2010). In other words, juveniles who possessed a low motivation to change were more likely to commit crimes than those who possessed a high level of motivation. This finding corroborates with the growth-fixed mindset motivational theory as those who were seen to have more motivation relied on dynamic (changing) personality traits than static (unchanging) traits. Youth that have a fixed mindset are not as motivated to change because of persisting beliefs that they are not capable of change. Thus, they continue to expand their criminal career and likely don’t plan on stopping. The researchers of this study believe their findings of low motivation to change connect to this theory as well. The authors state if an individual believes that they are able to change themselves and control the events around them, there will be active attempts to grow (Salekin, 2010). This directly connects to the growth mindset thinking.
Furthermore, in 2018, a study regarding self-stigma among criminal offenders produced findings relevant to the growth-fixed mindset perspective. In the scholarly article, “Self-Stigma Among Criminal Offenders: Risk and Protective Factors,” researchers conducted a study on male prison inmates and evaluated how stereotypes and poor mental illnesses affected them. The study findings suggest prison inmates are inclined to self-stigmatize due to common criminal stereotypes that are prevalent in American society. In addition, simply anticipating a stigma from his/her community post release negatively affects an individual’s ability to properly adjust back into his/her community (Moore, 2018). Researchers also found that the tendency to internalize stereotypes will affect the inmate’s behavior. Once one has internalized the criminal stereotype, they are more likely to align their behaviors with this new concept of themselves. In simpler terms, inmates will continue to commit criminal behaviors due to society’s perception of them which now informs their own perceptions of themselves (Moore, 2018). Fitting into the criminal role becomes natural to them because “that is who they truly are.” Upon release, a poor adjustment to the community due to internalizing the stigma will increase their likelihood of reoffending. Offenders reentering the community have adopted such a fixed mindset because they agree with their community’s stigma labels, informing their prescription that they cannot change. They will not stop committing crimes because they believe they are incapable of change. This study suggests intervention for inmates and attempting to reduce stigma surrounding their release will reduce the likelihood of recidivism (Moore, 2018). The intervention acts as an attempt to stop the internalization of the stereotypes in stigma. The intervention could be focused on encouraging inmates to adopt the growth mindset, helping them believe that they are not the crimes they committed, and the stigma associated with it. If inmates believe that they are capable of change, they will be motivated to change and less likely to reoffend post release.
Decreasing Recidivism Through Institutionalized Programs
So, once we have caught an offender and placed them in prison, what can we do to ensure these individuals avoid criminal behavior again? How can we make law-abiding behavior more appealing? What can we do to ensure a safe and promising reentry? These questions were thought of when determining the best approach to rehabilitating young juvenile offenders in the study conducted by Varghese et al. (2024). When they found that peer relationships were often a better predictor of criminal behavior than family values, they became interested in the part that role models play in influencing behavior. Specifically, they wanted to see how positive role models safeguard criminal behavior and increase career goal exploration. This is because lack of gainful employment upon release is associated with increased risk of recidivism and juveniles are often the least likely to receive help in career exploration. When comparing a mentorship program group with a “treatment as usual” (TAU) control group, results demonstrated that juveniles had a higher value for professional jobs in the mentorship group and increased value for authority-related jobs and “attention and spotlight” jobs in the control group. Additionally, the control group showed an increase in thrill seeking behavior and an increase in a self-inflated view that the mentorship group did not endorse. Ultimately, the mentorship program was deemed a success in promoting healthy relationships between mentors and mentees, increasing job interests, and increasing pro-social behavior.
When it comes to treating an offender, the controlling environment and lack of autonomy of the prison or jailhouse may interfere with the effectiveness of the given treatment. Cognitive Evaluation Theory states that all external events contain a controlling factor and a competence-informing factor. The controlling factor influences the autonomy needs of the individual, while the informational factor influences the competence of the individual (Reeve, 2018, p. 112). This theory can be used to elicit extrinsic motivation through influence or outright authority over someone’s behavior, whether this is obvious or subtle. In a prison setting, control is abundantly obvious, and the offender has very little autonomy to do the things they used to do on the outside in their regular life. However, some institutions offer optional treatment programs or opportunities to expand educational and work-related skills, while others may enforce a treatment program through referral. In the study conducted by Varghese et al. (2024), the juveniles were referred by the court to participate in the study and were randomized into either the career mentorship program or the “treatment as usual” program. A situation like this could be a form of extrinsic motivation referred to as external regulation or introjected regulation as there is very little autonomy and pressured compliance to avoid guilt and shame. Situations like these usually result in poor functioning as they lack the motivation to begin tasks unless there is an external prompt or push to do so (Reeve, 2018, p. 116). However, the program proved to be effective as the combination of mentors being close in age (volunteering college students), and the fun relationship building tasks, allowed for more serious engagement into the career exploration regardless of the fact they had no choice in completing it. This could’ve been due to the amount of praise or motivation the mentors instilled into their mentees, enhancing competence to a point that outweighed the low autonomy they had. This is because praise from someone, like a mentor, who’s opinion is valued and appreciated and is providing “clear, specific, [or] competence-diagnosing feedback” is so much better than coming from a police officer or prison guard that the juveniles don’t respect (Reeve, 2018, p. 114). The conclusion that should be drawn from this mentorship program is that effective treatment programs, at least for juveniles, should involve people who they can relate to or someone who they value the opinions of. This is because a highly controlling environment like a prison or jail should be matched with someone who can lift their competence high enough to combat the controlling environment.
Conclusion
In closing, recidivism is not an easy idea to encapsulate. There is so much that goes into a criminal’s mind and understanding how it works. Three motivational theories can be linked to the production of recidivism. The first motivational theory we explored was incentive theory. It is difficult to determine what individuals will recidivate, however, we can investigate overarching patterns. There are incentives that relate to why a person might commit a crime, and why a person might not commit a crime. It was found that familial bonds and friendships are the biggest incentives for a person to avoid committing a crime. On the flip side, there are also incentives to commit crimes. The perception of a low detection risk is one of the biggest incentives for criminals. If a person believes that they will get away with a crime, they will go through with it.
In addition, we also explored the growth-fixed mindset theory. The biggest takeaway from this theory is a person’s own perception of their ability to change. If a person possesses a fixed mindset and does not believe that their personal qualities and attributes are incapable of change, then they will not be motivated to change. Thus, criminals who internalize the criminal stereotype and their roles within this stereotype, they will be more likely to recidivate. On the flip side, a person who believes that they are capable of change is less likely to recidivate. This finding suggests that preventing recidivism should stem from encouraging a convicted individual to change their perception of themselves. Make them believe that they are not the crimes they committed and that they are capable of change. This will motivate them to stay away from reoffending and change as a person.
We end with exploring prevention strategies and institutional programs to assist offenders. The cognitive evaluation motivational theory gives some insight into what can influence a criminal’s behavior during their time at an institution. The cognitive evaluation theory analyzes an individual’s psychological needs for autonomy and competence. An offender’s time at an institutionalized program, such as a treatment program, can impact these psychological needs. Due to a lack of autonomy that inmates experience, this can decrease their intrinsic motivation. Thus, external influences are recommended to increase motivation and the offender’s competence needs. Finding a way to maintain the offender’s motivation through external influences increases the likelihood of a successful treatment program.
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