Terrorist recidivism in Israel: Rates, patterns and risk factors

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.