Recidivism and Reentry into the United States’ Criminal Justice System

Research Topic Selection
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Research Topic Selection
Research Topic and Rationale
The research topic is recidivism and reentry into the United States’ criminal justice system. The topic of recidivism is one of the most important ones that can be used to evaluate the criminal justice system’s effectiveness. The rate of recidivism and eventual readmission back to the criminal justice system is directly proportional to the system’s effectiveness in providing accurate correctional services to inmates so that they are reformed effectively and appropriately, or they do not get to reform as intended. While the topic of recidivism should be widely discussed throughout the scholarly world so that the effectiveness of corrective measures can be used to evaluate correctional management systems so that they are reviewed for their effectiveness, there is little literature available discussed in this aspect. The insufficient evidence points to the lack of scholarly interest in the subject and, thus, the absence of discussion. After visiting the database and searching on the topic of recidivism and readmission returned three results on the page, indicating that the topic has been tackled only three times in the past. The first available literature was published in the early eighties examining six years from 1980 to around 1986. A subsequent study published in the database was done approximately a decade later, and it was published in the mid-nineties, with the last one being published around 2010 for the same (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2014). This paper explores the topic of recidivism and reentry into the prison systems in the United States of America as a topic of concern based on several reasons discussed below.
Firstly, an area of research should be interesting enough to capture the attention of a sufficient audience for it to qualify as a critical research topic. The topic of recidivism is one of the most interesting topics of discussion in both the scholarly and media fields because it reflects the effectiveness of prison complex systems for the government and society. As such, it draws the government’s interest, including prison officials, the court system, the police, parliament, the media, and the society at large, presenting more sufficient audiences to be covered by the topic. Given such a large base of background audience, recidivism and reentry become a highly interesting area of research.
Secondly, an area or topic of research should draw the attention of further studies if there is a research gap at the moment that needs to be filled. While these pieces of evidence point to the lack of substantial literature av...