Recidivism in young offenders: risk and protective factors

This paper shows the main results of an empirical research conducted under the ILA employability project (Innovative Learning Approaches in Staff Training and Young Offenders' Employability Support), an European project that supports inclusion of youth at risk. The research aimed at identifying the criminogenic factors of young delinquency in order to find a way to reduce the recidivism likelihood. Moreover, the study has concretely developed and tested a tool to foresee the recidivism risk. In our perspective, recidivism is not conceived as a simple chronological sequence of crimes, but as the persistence over time of motivations, aspects of personality, lifestyles, and other social and psychological characteristics that make the recidivist to persist in doing criminal acts. The data were collected in 2015 through a standardized questionnaire, administered to a sample of 364 inmates, detained in youth detention centers from Romania, Spain and Cyprus, i.e. the countries partners of the ILA project.