The Limits of Recidivism Measuring Success After Prison (2022) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2 Measuring Recidivism
2 Measuring Recidivism
Pages 17-68
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 17... ...
. The desire for greater accountability for public agencies and individuals in the criminal legal system, combined with the emergence of new arrest and court administrative data, facilitated the calculation of recidivism rates for people released from prison.
|
From page 18... ...
Too often, errors can be made by those interpreting and relying on recidivism data to make policy and programmatic decisions within the criminal legal system. ANNUAL PRISON RELEASES We begin by exploring patterns of prison releases in the United States, one population for whom recidivism rates are regularly calculated, and then review Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)
|
From page 19... ...
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the volume of releases declined but kept pace with the prior trend, whereas the decline in the volume of admissions was larger than expected by an order of magnitude. Prison recidivism rates are often measured by the proportion of individuals who left prison in a given year who are later rearrested or reincarcerated (e.g., see "Recidivism in Bureau of Justice Statistics Reports" below)
|
From page 20... ...
These patterns of readmission illustrate a type of measurement error that arises in using aggregate statistics from administrative data to characterize recidivism. Prison admissions arising from technical violations of conditions of supervision may result from failure to meet conditions imposed on persons supervised in the community following release from prison (such as drug test failures, failure to show up for meetings, or failure to pay fees)
|
From page 21... ...
. If pure technical violators serve less time than those admitted on technical violations stemming from new crimes, their contribution to the size of the prison population would be much smaller.
|
From page 22... ...
Recidivism in Bureau of Justice Statistics Reports The BJS prisoner recidivism reports are widely cited for providing postprison recidivism statistics on large samples of persons released from state prisons. Relying on criminal history records from state and federal repositories, BJS has prepared several recidivism measures for five cohorts released from prison in 11 states in 1983 (Beck and Shipley, 1989)
|
From page 23... ...
The criminal history data that BJS uses in its studies are the same records that police officers use to determine a suspect's current criminal justice status (e.g., on probation, parole, or bail) ; that judges use to make pretrial and sentencing decisions; and that corrections officials use to make inmate classification decisions (Durose, Cooper, and Snyder, 2014)
|
From page 24... ...
Return to prison refers to any return to prison, including for a technical violation or following conviction for a new crime. SOURCE: Durose and Antenangeli (2021)
|
From page 25... ...
. The other public order offense category is an undifferentiated category comprising conditional release violations (which include the aforementioned technical violations and arrests for new crimes reported as technical violations)
|
From page 26... ...
Percentages for any violent, any property, any drug, and any public order offense do not sum to 100 because individuals may be rearrested on more than one occasion, or rearrested and charged for more than one offense type. SOURCE: Durose and Antenangeli (2021)
|
From page 27... ...
that information is stored in criminal history repositories in the states that participate in the BJS cohort studies. Close inspection of rearrests indicates that while rearrests for violent crimes exceed the proportion of individuals convicted of violent offenses in the release cohort, many instances of recidivism result from other public order charges that do not necessarily align with measures of serious criminal behavior.
|
From page 28... ...
As noted earlier, evidence suggests that many if not a majority of events recorded as technical violations are actually new crimes or arrests of persons on parole, where the conditions of parole lead to a technical violation for a new crime (Grattet, Petersilia, and Lin, 2008)
|
From page 29... ...
They were able to attribute the difference to technical violations, such as failure to comply with parole restrictions, rather than new criminal behaviors, illustrating a type of analysis that can help illuminate the extent to which recidivism arises from the decisions made by criminal legal system actors versus new offense behaviors. Comparing outcomes across samples and locations can contribute to an understanding of what may work to help reduce recidivism events.
|
From page 30... ...
revocations, and it indicates noncompliance with conditions of supervision including commitment of a new crime as well as technical violations such as positive drug tests, non-reporting, and failing to attend treatment (Hooks, 2021)
|
From page 31... ...
These different periods not only have implications for measured recidivism rates, but they are linked to different research questions about supervision. Samples and Populations of Interest: Event-Based and Person-Based Methods The samples used to study recidivism need to be specified relative to the study purposes and derived from the populations about which inferences are to be made.
|
From page 32... ...
The BJS prison recidivism studies of individuals released from prison use event-based samples, and their reports refer to the samples as such by explicitly citing the recidivism rates of persons released from prison during a given year. However, the BJS statistics have also been misused to describe populations other than the ones from which the samples are drawn.
|
From page 33... ...
. As shown in Table 2-3 below, recidivism rates for event-based release cohorts are higher than those for person-based samples.
|
From page 34... ...
For a prison population to be stationary, the annual number of admissions and admissions by class have to be constant for a long period of time and the number of admissions must equal the number of releases. Use of exiting event cohorts is most appropriate in answering questions that pertain to a population that experiences an event, such as all persons in a treatment program, or the recidivism rate of a cohort, or whether the recidivism rates of exiting cohorts have changed over time (presuming appropriate adjustments for compositional differences in cohorts)
|
From page 35... ...
Similarly, reincarceration rates can be refined to distinguish those following from a new sentence from those that did not and, if the data allow, the reasons for technical violations that result in return to prison. These distinctions among categories of events that measure recidivism indicate that measures of events derived from criminal legal agency records reflect both the actions of criminal legal system officials and the behavior of individuals.
|
From page 36... ...
All classes of administrative data reflect the intersection of individual behaviors and criminal legal responses, and this source of measurement error may not be randomly distributed (see below for a detailed discussion)
|
From page 37... ...
State criminal cleared and exceptional clearances; need to go to the criminal history history repositories contain disposition data state repository to obtain these records. State law is repositories (nationwide, in about 82% of arrests)
|
From page 38... ...
Technical Probation Indication of a supervising agency's decisions, Records typically do not detail the nature of violations of supervising which when associated with other agency the events that led to a technical violation/ conditions of agencies, which data provide indications of the probability of revocation, or include the dates or severity supervision may be federal, revocation conditional upon repeated measured of the violation behavior. Few systems track state or county; behaviors (e.g., the number of failed drug tests the nature of the events.
|
From page 39... ...
For example, one person may think of or characterize a burglary as a robbery even though the event was breaking and entering and did not involve use of force to take property. Self-report surveys that allow respondents to self-define criminal events or to affirm behaviors that fall into broad categories introduce measurement error into the classification of events.
|
From page 40... ...
found that respondents who had several convictions or convictions for more serious offenses were more likely to under-report them, while older persons were less likely to over-report seriousness. Overall, the authors found a high level of concurrent validity between the self-report and official records.
|
From page 41... ...
Measures using administrative data indicate arrested, charged, and convicted offending behaviors and not necessarily all actual offense behaviors. Charged behaviors reflect the interactions of individuals with the legal system.
|
From page 42... ...
Arrest records are supplemented by information provided by prosecutors' of fices, courts, and correctional agencies, each of which contributes data to complete the CHRI by submitting information about subsequent dispositions of charges. A completed criminal history record contains information about arrest charges, including their dispositions, sentences, and custody dates.
|
From page 43... ...
Failure to distinguish between a parole revocation that occurs because of a new offense and a technical violation may lead to an overestimate of criminal behavior if violations of supervision such as drug test failures are included as criminal behaviors. While criminal history records can provide researchers with the most comprehensive and accessible source of data on recidivism as measured by criminal legal agencies, a number of reliability concerns are associated with administrative data.
|
From page 44... ...
State requirements on the non-felonious arrests to report to the criminal history repositories differ, so the scope of what is included in nonfelonious arrest records also varies. Dispositions of arrests are incomplete.
|
From page 45... ...
Court dispositions are reported to the states' criminal history repositories, although complete disposition data may not exist in the repositories. Court records include information about each charge in a case when a defendant is charged with multiple offenses.
|
From page 46... ...
The extent of what is recorded varies and may include information about each interaction, outcomes of drug tests, and engagement in reintegration activities such as employment. Theoretically, the records of interactions can be reviewed to understand patterns leading to technical violations.
|
From page 47... ...
who evaluated technical violations in California and concluded that 65 percent involved behaviors alleged to violate the California Penal Code, and that about 10 percent of these were serious penal code violations. The BJS Annual Survey on Probation and Annual Survey on Parole reports that 6.5 percent of individuals exiting probation are incarcerated without a new sentence and 4.9 percent are incarcerated with a new sentence.
|
From page 48... ...
Measurement Error Earlier we described, in general terms, the sources of measurement error in both administrative and self-report data that measure recidivism events. All recidivism measures derived from administrative data reflect decisions by criminal legal system actors to take action and to record the actions taken in specific ways, as dictated by their roles in the criminal legal system and administrative records systems.
|
From page 49... ...
recommend thoughtful consideration of the extent and form of noise in dependent variables and how the noise may bias inferences. A more complete understanding of the nature of measurement error can improve the use of administrative data for measuring recidivism events.
|
From page 50... ...
; • designing studies that take into account differences among or within agencies in responses to offenses and how this affects the recording of recidivism events; • further work on self-report and administrative data to better understand, in particular, how relatively minor offenses find their way into administrative data; and • other research designs that improve our understanding of the effects of measurement error on recidivism estimates. The sources and types of measurement error in recidivism measures require greater attention by researchers.
|
From page 51... ...
To the committee's knowledge, no such efforts are underway to document sentencing decisions. Within states, the state criminal history record repositories collect and integrate records of arrests and prosecutions.
|
From page 52... ...
. Breaking down recidivism rates by offense type (e.g., violent, property, public order)
|
From page 53... ...
This conflation occurs even if technical violations are a signal that persons under supervision are failing to adjust their behaviors to community norms, portending a return to crime (Bushway and Apel, 2012) , or if sanctioning technical violations is done to prevent more crime through incapacitation, specific deterrence, and general deterrence (Piehl and LoBuglio, 2005)
|
From page 54... ...
Self-report data may over- or under-state criminal behavior and are typically costly to collect. Administrative data and their associated measures reflect some combination of individual behavior and criminal legal system actors' responses and decisions.
|
From page 55... ...
6. Explanations of recidivism rates that do not take into account the risk environments into which persons released from prison return may lead to misleading inferences about what affects the rates.
|
From page 56... ...
5. Improvements are warranted in administrative data and criminal history records to enable them to focus on distinguishing events, such as pure technical violations vs.
|
From page 57... ...
the same way are best avoided. Researchers are best served by drawing on recent reports on modernizing crime statistics for ideas about taxonomies and classification of the many types of criminal legal system actions so that greater emphasis can be placed on offense-specific measures to assess the impact of a policy or program on criminal behavior.
|
From page 58... ...
. The parolee–parole officer relationship as a mediator of criminal justice outcomes.
|
From page 59... ...
Criminal Justice and Behavior 42, 10, 977–989. Chamberlain, A.W.
|
From page 60... ...
. Multistate Criminal History Patterns of Prisoners Released in 30 States.
|
From page 61... ...
. Survey of State Criminal History Information Systems, 2018.
|
From page 62... ...
Journal of Criminal Justice 12, 617–623. Holtfreter, K., Reisig, M.D., and Morash, M
|
From page 63... ...
Criminal Justice Review 28, 278–298. Link, N.W., and Hamilton, L.K.
|
From page 64... ...
Journal of Criminal Justice 36, 416–425. Miller, J., Caplan, J.M, and Ostermann, M
|
From page 65... ...
. Predicting probation outcomes: Factors associated with probation rearrest, revocations, and technical violations during supervision.
|
From page 66... ...
. Getting technical: Parole officers' continued use of technical violations under California's parole reform agenda.
|
From page 67... ...
. The social, psychological, and political causes of racial disparities in the American criminal justice system.
|
From page 68... ...
Journal of Criminal Justice 38, 538–544. Weisberg, R
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.