A re-offender is any person who commits any offence in a one-year follow up period consequently receiving a court conviction, reprimand, warning or caution in that one year period. Simply put a re-offender is anyone who commits a recognizable and punishable crime during a one year follow up period.
In 2011-2012, 32% of the 47,349 (Tom whitehead, 2016) young offenders re-offended within the follow up period. This seems to be a rather worrying issue as with the number of first time offenders decreasing the number of re-offenders is still extremely large. Nevertheless it is important to review the effectiveness of rehabilitation programmes, from the worrying trend it could be said that those programmes are failing.