Followup studies of released offenders in the community have frequently provided poor indices of recidivism because of their failure to discriminate between different kinds of violations and adjustment to the community. To develop a new criterion for measuring recidivism, information on the postrelease behavior of 142 adult male felons was gathered over an 18.5 month period after their release. The new criterion the Law Encounter Severity Scale (LESS), consisted of 38 categories, ranking in a continuum of severity from no violations to conviction of a felony. The scale was then grouped into five basic clusters of violations. Comparisons between the LESS and the Environmental Deprivation Scale (EDS) and the Maladaptive Behavior Record (MBR) showed the LESS to be an effective criterion for assessing individual law violations. A copy of the LESS with sample distributions is included in the appendix. (SM)