Do Most Prison Inmates Recidivate or Commit Crimes Again
Why Practise So Many Ex-Cons Terminate Up Dorsum in Prison?
Maybe they don't—a provocative new study says recidivism rates are drastically lower than nosotros remember.
A California State Prison, Solano, inmate installs a drought-tolerant garden in the prison k, Oct. xix, 2015, Vacaville, California.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty
1 of the most frequently cited and dispiriting statistics about the American criminal justice organization is that more than than half of land prisoners end up returning to prison within five years of their release.* These numbers come from a study conducted by the federal regime's Bureau of Justice Statistics, in which researchers tracked well-nigh 400,000 people from around the country who were released from state prisons in 2005. The potent implication of the findings is that people who are incarcerated are extremely likely to reoffend once they're free and that nearly of them spend their lives in and out of correctional facilities.
But what if the BJS's findings have been fundamentally misunderstood? That'southward the provocative contention of a contempo paper published in the journal Crime & Delinquency, the title of which is "Post-obit Incarceration, Most Released Offenders Never Return to Prison house."
The newspaper, which was produced by researchers at the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based public policy firm Abt Associates and circulated online this week by criminal justice experts, argues that the conventional wisdom almost backsliding in America is flatly wrong. In reality, the authors of the paper written report, 2 out of 3 people who serve time in prison never come dorsum, and only 11 percent come back multiple times.
The reason for the shocking discrepancy betwixt these new findings and those of the BJS, according to Abt'south William Rhodes, is that the BJS used a sample population in which repeat offenders were vastly overrepresented.
I called Rhodes to ask him about why this happened and how he and his co-authors avoided the same problem in their analysis. His explanation for why the backsliding problem is not about as bad every bit many of us have believed is below; our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.
Let's offset with the conventional wisdom on recidivism in the U.Due south. What is it, and where did it come from?
The conventional wisdom is that there'due south a very high charge per unit of recidivism, where recidivism is defined as being arrested for a new crime or having your community supervision condition revoked for a technical violation.
I know the Agency of Justice Statistics has collected statistics on backsliding at least twice, mayhap three times, and what they do is starting time with a sample of offenders who are released from prison during a given year, then friction 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—by observing the individuals in their sample over a period of some years. They're not controversial statistics. At that place's no manipulation that goes on. Information technology's purely tabulation.
So the mode it works is they choose a year and rails a cohort of people in their sample and see who comes dorsum? It seems pretty straightforward.
That's exactly right.
Then what's wrong with their results?
It is difficult to explicate to a nonstatistician. I try to employ an analogy: Suppose that I were asked to describe a population of people who go to shopping malls. What I might practise is go to the mall and perform an "intercept survey"—that is, I'd randomly select people who are entering the mall and enquire them about themselves—tape their age, sex, race, and frequency of visiting the mall. The trouble is, I'd probably exercise that over a pretty curt menstruation of time, similar a calendar week. So I'd get a lot of people who are frequent mall visitors and fewer people who aren't. Yous know, if you become to a mall yous'll meet an elderly population who go daily, to practise by walking through the mall. You'll as well meet a number of people who but similar malls, and mayhap they go weekly. Or y'all'll discover, occasionally, people like me, who go about once a year when they need to purchase a washing machine or something. If yous did a simple tabulation of all the people you intercepted during a calendar week you'd go 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 matter is happening with the Agency of Justice Statistics when they accept a sample of people who have been released from prison during a given year.
Right. They're not attempting to exist misleading. What they're reporting is truthful: If you take people who are released from prison during a given year, here'south the rate at which they'll render. Simply it gets translated in people'south heads as, "Here's what happens to offenders in general."
In truth what you have is ii groups of offenders: those who repeatedly do crimes and accrue in prisons considering 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 manner the BJS has washed it, is y'all're more than probable to have people in your sample who come back a lot than you are to take people who don't come up back at all.
That's exactly right, yeah.
What data is your report based on?
At Abt Associates we assemble information into something called the National Corrections Reporting Programme. It records prison terms for offenders across almost all of the states. For a large number of states, that data goes back to 2000. Then we can observe when somebody enters and when somebody exits prison, and that allows us to wait at individual offenders and say, "Given that they've been incarcerated at least once, how frequently do they come dorsum?" So y'all're looking at a large number of offenders, over a nearly 15-year period, and what you notice is that virtually of those offenders do not come back. They're incarcerated, they serve their term, they don't return.
So your data gear up contains information at the private level? You know when a specific person went in and when he got out?
That's correct. If yous were in the dataset, nosotros would track yous. Nosotros probably wouldn't have your proper noun, merely we'd have an identification code that the country would result you as an inmate.
So what do you lot have to do to correct for the overrepresentation of repeat offenders in the dataset?
You weight them differently. It'south not arbitrary of course—the weighting is washed so that you have an appropriate representation of all offenders rather than an overrepresentation of high-rate offenders. In order to go the right weights, you have to exist able to observe a long period—the 15 years we look at.
And so the reason you're looking at the stretch of time, rather than just one year, is it gives y'all what you demand to know in order to weight specific individuals the right amount.
That's right.
Correction, Nov. 2, 2015: This article originally misstated that a Agency of Justice Statistics written report on recidivism found that 68 percent of state prisoners ended upward back behind bars within three years of their release, and about 75 percent came dorsum inside five. These numbers referred to rates of re-arrest, not re-imprisonment. The BJS study plant that about 50 and 55 percent of land prisoners returned to prison inside three and 5 years, respectively. (Return.)
What's important is being clear about what question you're trying to answer. If your question is, "Of all the people who go to prison, what's the rate at which they come back?" and so our calculations are better. But if you wanted to inquire a question nigh a specific release accomplice—almost people who are released during a given twelvemonth—and how frequently they come back, then the other methodology is the advisable 1. But they're questions nigh two dissimilar populations of people. The first one is the population of offenders in full general.
So what are the BJS numbers good for?
Well, there are reasons for using data like that. You might do information technology if you wanted to evaluate whether a program you introduced in prison reduced recidivism. So you'd want to look at a particular cohort that was released during a item year and judge whether the treatment you introduced was effective or not.
But if you desire to look at how offenders really interact with the criminal justice arrangement, then the methods we propose are more advisable.
My understanding of the lives of people who go to prison was very much colored by the notion that they tend to exist incarcerated over and over—that they come out of prison and they take a very small chance of staying free. What you're saying is that's but actually true for a certain subset of the population of people who are incarcerated.
Yeah, that's right. Most people really do not render to prison. They're not defenseless in what we telephone call the cycle of incarceration. They don't churn, to use one of the popular words. Simply some practise.
Are there policy implications from this that you've idea most?
Yeah, I remember there are. It would take more careful report, but others accept pointed out that there are very low-level offenders who manage to readjust, and you ought to focus the rehabilitation resources you have on those individuals who are high-gamble offenders. They're the ones who are going to benefit nearly from treatment—or, I should say, society's going to benefit most from treating them. The problem, of course, is identifying them. That'south why criminologists have attempted to develop run a risk assessment tools, to place the high-chance offenders and treat them, while almost letting the others recover by themselves.
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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