When Someone Gets Out of Jail Are They More Likely Going to Do It Again
Why Do So Many Ex-Cons End Up Back in Prison?
Perchance they don't—a provocative new report says backsliding rates are drastically lower than we think.
A California State Prison, Solano, inmate installs a drought-tolerant garden in the prison chiliad, Oct. 19, 2015, Vacaville, California.
Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty
I of the most oftentimes cited and dispiriting statistics about the American criminal justice system is that more half of land prisoners end upwards returning to prison inside five years of their release.* These numbers come from a written report conducted by the federal government's Agency of Justice Statistics, in which researchers tracked about 400,000 people from effectually the country who were released from state prisons in 2005. The strong implication of the findings is that people who are incarcerated are extremely likely to reoffend once they're free and that most of them spend their lives in and out of correctional facilities.
Simply what if the BJS'south findings take been fundamentally misunderstood? That's the provocative contention of a contempo newspaper published in the journal Crime & Delinquency, the title of which is "Following Incarceration, Most Released Offenders Never Return to Prison."
The paper, which was produced past researchers at the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based public policy business firm Abt Associates and circulated online this week by criminal justice experts, argues that the conventional wisdom about recidivism in America is flatly incorrect. In reality, the authors of the paper report, 2 out of 3 people who serve time in prison never come back, and only eleven pct come back multiple times.
The reason for the shocking discrepancy between these new findings and those of the BJS, co-ordinate to Abt'south William Rhodes, is that the BJS used a sample population in which repeat offenders were vastly overrepresented.
I called Rhodes to enquire him about why this happened and how he and his co-authors avoided the same problem in their analysis. His explanation for why the recidivism problem is non almost as bad as many of us have believed is below; our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.
Allow's first with the conventional wisdom on backsliding in the U.S. What is it, and where did it come from?
The conventional wisdom is that at that place'south a very high rate of backsliding, where recidivism is defined equally being arrested for a new offense or having your community supervision status revoked for a technical violation.
I know the Agency of Justice Statistics has nerveless statistics on backsliding at least twice, maybe iii times, and what they practice is first with a sample of offenders who are released from prison during a given year, then match those release records with criminal history records to decide who recidivates. Then they compute their statistics—the rate at which the released offenders are arrested for new crimes and the rate at which they're readmitted to prison house—by observing the individuals in their sample over a period of some years. They're not controversial statistics. There'due south no manipulation that goes on. It's purely tabulation.
And so the way it works is they cull a yr and track a cohort of people in their sample and run into who comes back? It seems pretty straightforward.
That's exactly right.
So what's incorrect with their results?
It is hard to explain to a nonstatistician. I try to use an analogy: Suppose that I were asked to describe a population of people who go to shopping malls. What I might practice is go to the mall and perform an "intercept survey"—that is, I'd randomly select people who are inbound the mall and inquire them nigh themselves—tape their age, sex, race, and frequency of visiting the mall. The problem is, I'd probably do that over a pretty short period of time, like a calendar week. So I'd get a lot of people who are frequent mall visitors and fewer people who aren't. You lot know, if you go to a mall you'll see an elderly population who go daily, to exercise past walking through the mall. You'll too come across a number of people who simply like malls, and maybe they become weekly. Or you'll find, occasionally, people similar me, who go most once a year when they need to buy a washing machine or something. If yous did a simple tabulation of all the people y'all intercepted during a week you'd get a large proportion of frequent mall visitors. And they wouldn't be representative of people who visit malls—they'd be representative of frequent mall visitors.
And the same affair is happening with the Bureau of Justice Statistics when they have a sample of people who have been released from prison house during a given twelvemonth.
Correct. They're not attempting to be misleading. What they're reporting is true: If you take people who are released from prison during a given twelvemonth, here'southward the charge per unit at which they'll render. Simply information technology gets translated in people'south heads as, "Here's what happens to offenders in full general."
In truth what you take is two groups of offenders: those who repeatedly practice crimes and accumulate in prisons because they get recaptured, reconvicted, and resentenced; and those who are much lower risk, and most of them will go to prison once and non come back.
So the problem with taking a snapshot of a particular year, the fashion the BJS has washed it, is yous're more than likely to accept people in your sample who come back a lot than you are to have people who don't come dorsum at all.
That'southward exactly right, yeah.
What data is your study based on?
At Abt Assembly we gather data into something called the National Corrections Reporting Program. It records prison terms for offenders across near all of the states. For a large number of states, that information goes dorsum to 2000. So we can observe when somebody enters and when somebody exits prison, and that allows usa to look at individual offenders and say, "Given that they've been incarcerated at least in one case, how oft do they come back?" And then you lot're looking at a large number of offenders, over a nearly fifteen-year menstruation, and what you detect is that about of those offenders exercise non come up back. They're incarcerated, they serve their term, they don't return.
And so your data set contains information at the individual level? You know when a specific person went in and when he got out?
That'due south correct. If yous were in the dataset, we would track you. We probably wouldn't have your proper noun, just we'd have an identification code that the state would outcome you lot as an inmate.
So what practice you accept to practice to correct for the overrepresentation of repeat offenders in the dataset?
You weight them differently. Information technology'south non arbitrary of course—the weighting is done so that y'all have an appropriate representation of all offenders rather than an overrepresentation of high-rate offenders. In gild to get the right weights, you accept to be able to observe a long menstruum—the fifteen years we look at.
So the reason you're looking at the stretch of time, rather than simply 1 year, is it gives you lot what y'all need to know in gild to weight specific individuals the correct amount.
That'southward correct.
Correction, Nov. 2, 2015: This article originally misstated that a Agency of Justice Statistics study on recidivism found that 68 percent of state prisoners ended up back behind confined within three years of their release, and virtually 75 percent came back inside five. These numbers referred to rates of re-arrest, not re-imprisonment. The BJS study found that about 50 and 55 percent of state prisoners returned to prison within three and v years, respectively. (Render.)
What's important is beingness clear about what question you're trying to answer. If your question is, "Of all the people who go to prison house, what's the rate at which they come back?" and so our calculations are better. But if you wanted to enquire a question near a specific release cohort—nearly people who are released during a given yr—and how oftentimes they come up back, then the other methodology is the advisable one. But they're questions about two different populations of people. The outset one is the population of offenders in general.
And then what are the BJS numbers proficient for?
Well, in that location are reasons for using data similar that. Y'all might exercise it if you lot wanted to evaluate whether a program you introduced in prison reduced recidivism. And then y'all'd want to look at a particular cohort that was released during a particular year and judge whether the treatment you introduced was effective or non.
Only if you lot want to wait at how offenders really collaborate with the criminal justice system, and then the methods nosotros propose are more appropriate.
My understanding of the lives of people who go to prison house was very much colored by the notion that they tend to exist incarcerated over and over—that they come out of prison house and they have a very modest hazard of staying free. What you lot're saying is that'south merely really true for a sure subset of the population of people who are incarcerated.
Yes, that's right. Nearly people actually exercise not render to prison house. They're not defenseless in what we call the bike of incarceration. They don't churn, to employ one of the popular words. But some do.
Are there policy implications from this that you've thought about?
Yeah, I recollect there are. It would take more conscientious study, but others have pointed out that in that location are very low-level offenders who manage to readjust, and y'all ought to focus the rehabilitation resources you take on those individuals who are high-take chances offenders. They're the ones who are going to do good well-nigh from treatment—or, I should say, society's going to benefit most from treating them. The trouble, of form, is identifying them. That'southward why criminologists take attempted to develop take a chance cess tools, to identify the high-run a risk offenders and treat them, while almost letting the others recover by themselves.
Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/10/why-do-so-many-prisoners-end-up-back-in-prison-a-new-study-says-maybe-they-dont.html
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