The Limits of Recidivism Measuring Success After Prison (2022) / Chapter Skim
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In fact, the National Institute of Corrections describes successful reintegration as a "critical aspect of correctional missions to improve public safety." Nevertheless, while evaluations of success among individuals released from prison affect perceptions of the performance of our institutions and the safety of our communities, our attempts to evaluate success face serious limitations. 1 Citations to support the text and conclusions of this summary are provided in the body of the report.
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Committee members also brought expertise in criminal legal policy and reentry programming, and personal experience of incarceration and reentry. To respond to their charge, the committee examined the existing literature and relevant data sources on recidivism, desistance, and broader post-release outcomes.
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To date, the bulk of evaluation of the outcomes of criminal legal system involvement, particularly for people released from prison, has typically relied on measures of recidivism, which purport to measure the likelihood that previously incarcerated individuals will commit new crimes and eventually return to prison. However, existing recidivism measures offer a narrow understanding of reentry and can be misleading if researchers and policy makers are not aware of the varying sampling strategies used to assess how the prison experience affects the life outcomes of individuals after release.
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They can be both over-inclusive, by recording mistaken arrests and wrongful convictions, and under-inclusive, by failing to capture undetected criminal activity. While administrative records capture the most serious criminal behavior reasonably well, victimization surveys indicate that a large fraction of criminal behavior goes undetected.4 Nor do these measures account for the 4 For example, results from the National Crime Victimization Survey indicate that victims or others reported just 40 percent of violent victimizations and 33 percent of property victimizations to the police in 2020 (Morgan and Thompson, 2021)
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A robust body of scientific evidence on desistance demonstrates that the cessation of criminal activity occurs incrementally and can involve setbacks. For example, an individual on the path toward ceasing criminal activity may commit additional crimes but with declining frequency or seriousness, indicating that they are on the path to desistance.
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For example, an individual may prioritize success in certain domains and thus have a sense of well-being despite setbacks in other domains. Neither recidivism nor desistance encompasses this broader conception of success, and researchers and practitioners in the criminal legal space lack adequate methods of measuring it, though promising models have been validated in other disciplines (see Chapter 4 for examples)
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Uniform national standards for measuring success among individuals released from prison would augment the comparability of program evaluations and the utility of administrative and other data across multiple policy domains. The development of a website containing core measures and instruments would hasten the eventual development of uniform measurement standards.
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Executing the committee's recommended improvements will require the investment of researchers, practitioners, administrators, policy makers, and private funders. It will require advances in data collection, new lines of research, sustained collaboration across disciplines and policy domains, and shifts in shared terminology.
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