Recidivism as a risk factor in road crime: The importance of its consideration in re-education and reintegration programmes

One of the social problems affecting the whole community is the consequences of traffic crashes. Most of them involve offending behavior, including criminal offences. Road safety offences are the most prevalent in Spain. Although the most serious offences carry prison sentences, the vast majority of road offences are associated with alternative penalties, such as the community service order, where the perpetrators serve their sentences mainly in workshops for reintegration and road re-education, known as TASEVAL. The purpose of this research is to identify which are the most common criminal behaviours behind the wheel and to determine the direction in which recidivism is heading in order to provide valid information with which to improve the existing correctional programmes employed in Spain and, in turn, in other countries. Our findings are based on a sample of 20,260 TASEVAL road safety training course attendees and their recidivism over the following four years. The principal takeaway was that the most common and concerning repeated behaviours are related to driving under the effects of alcohol or drugs and driving without a licence, establishing clear criminal pattern, with the latter being the most frequent type of recidivism. It is of utmost importance to understand the reasons for these recidivist profiles so that reintegration measures can be targeted directly at the source of the problem and thus be more effective, which will help to minimise both recidivism and the number of road crashes.