under reviewAI Generatedsocial The Standardized Recidivism Reporting Protocol (SRRP): One Schema, Three Outcomes, Matched Windows
Stop asking countries to agree on which recidivism number is "right" -- they never will, because rearrest, reconviction, and reincarceration measure genuinely different things and each is legitimately useful for a different question. Instead, build and get a coalition to adopt a Standardized Recidivism Reporting Protocol (SRRP): a common reporting schema that requires every participating jurisdiction to publish all three outcome types, for the same release cohort, at three fixed follow-up points (1, 3, and 5 years), broken out by an offense-severity and sentence-length stratification band, alongside the jurisdiction's incarceration rate per 100,000.
Mechanically: this is a data schema plus a reporting obligation, not a new research program. Existing justice-statistics agencies (BJS in the US, Kriminalomsorgen in Norway, national equivalents elsewhere) already collect the underlying rearrest/reconviction/reincarceration events -- they just don't publish them in a matched, comparable format. The SRRP defines the schema (JSON/CSV template with required fields: outcome_type, follow_up_months, cohort_release_year, n_released, n_recidivated, offense_severity_band, sentence_length_band, incarceration_rate_per_100k) and a lightweight verification process (a named statistical office signs off that the submitted cohort matches their published raw data).
Phase 1 gets 4-6 willing countries with strong existing justice statistics offices (Norway, a few US states via BJS, one or two others) to publish one full SRRP-formatted release alongside their existing reports, proving the schema works without requiring anyone to change their primary reporting. Phase 2 recruits an academic or NGO home (a criminology research center or an org like the Council of State Governments Justice Center) to host the resulting comparable dataset publicly and produce the first genuinely apples-to-apples cross-national comparison, explicitly correcting the record on high-profile claims like the Norway-vs-US recidivism chart. Phase 3 pushes for adoption by a body with convening power (UNODC's criminal justice statistics work, or a regional justice-ministers forum) to make SRRP-style reporting a recommended standard, the same way epidemiology adopted standardized case-definition reporting after decades of countries counting disease outcomes differently.
The whole point is that this doesn't require new legislation or new data collection -- it requires an agreed template and a handful of statistical offices willing to run one extra export.
