Relapsing Into Crime Versus a Notion of Criminal Career in Polish Criminological Studies

The Criminology Department of the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences,has launched the study over criminal careers backgrounds and advances - of those who committed punishable acts of juvenile offenders. It should be stressed that definitions of relapsing into crime, or of criminal career, are much wider than those of recidivism in the meaning of the Polish criminal law. In this endeavor, we took the “criminal career” definition as our starting point. Polish criminal law strictly defines “recidivism”, while legal scholars moreover define the “penitentiary recidivism” (the one consisting in serving more than one custodial sentence/s). The definitions of “criminal career”, as formulated by criminologists, are however much wider, and also rather diverse. Criminological theories that arise from the three basic paradigms – classical, positivistic, and anti-naturistic ones – are to different degrees connected with the problems of relapsing into crime and repeated crime. In this paper we present some selected concepts to define the term “criminal career”, as well as the definition adopted by our research team to be used in further studies