Came across the word ‘recidivism’ while reading a speech by Singapore’s former Defense Minister Mr Ng Eng Hen. The exact word came from the paragraph reproduced below:
“Over the past decade or so, we have witnessed a reversion to past policies and practices, old unhealthy habits, and recidivism in geopolitics. As celebrated American author Mark Twain famously intuited: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.””
I am familiar with the word ‘reversion’. Common for traders that simply means shifting back to the typical such as reversion to its mean. Recidivism here means the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend. Is the reversion of someone who has been convicted in the past to repeat the offence. A simpler term could be ‘reoffending’.
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