Criminological Characteristics of a Repeat Offender's Personality: Key Contemporary Trends of Changes in Parameters

Abstract

A high level of recidivism is a dangerous trend in contemporary Russian crime. Of all offenders registered in 2021, 60 % had committed crimes earlier. This testifies to a strong criminal orientation of offenders, the drawbacks in the legal regulation and the practice of prevention, and a low effectiveness of punishments and other measures of criminal law impact. A criminological study of the personality of a repeat offender will make it possible to identify its characteristics and specific features which, in their turn, will help to gain a better understanding of the causes of recidivist criminal conduct and contribute to the improvement of measures of individual prevention. In spite of a considerable interest to the personality of a repeat offender in criminological publications, there is no unified approach to the definition of this concept. Authors analyze different groups of repeat offenders that are formed using certain characteristics. Some scholars believe that a repeat offender is a person who commits another crime after being sentences to the deprivation of liberty for the previous one. For the purposes of this article, the personality of a repeat offender is understood as an aggregate of socio-demographic, social role and moral-psychological features typical of people who commit repeat offences while already having a criminal record. The author analyzed the published statistical data of the Court Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on socio-demographic, social role and moral-psychological features of convicts with unexpunged or unexpired convictions who committed a new crime, and outlined some contemporary changes in the group characteristics of repeat offenders. It is shown that the share of women-recidivists is growing, as well as the specific weight of persons who are 30-49 years of age. The author notes a rising level of education of convicts with a previous criminal record which, however, did not affect the number of repeat offences. As a rule, repeat offences happened when the convicts did not have a source of stable income, besides, in recent years the situation in the employment sphere worsened and the share of unemployed repeat offenders rose. The identified trend of lower gravity of repeat offences could testify to a rising level of latent recidivism. It is shown that persons convicted to punishments without isolation from the society pose a higher recidivism danger, which leads to the necessity of improving the practice of imposing and enforcing such punishments.