The Limits of Recidivism Measuring Success After Prison (2022) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 66-128
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From page 66... ...
. Getting technical: Parole officers' continued use of technical violations under California's parole reform agenda.
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. The family's role in the reintegration of formerly incarcerated individuals: The direct effects of emotional support.
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Committee on Evaluating Success Among People Released from Prison Meeting #2: Public Information Gathering Session. Washington, DC: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
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In addition to understanding the extent to which criminal behavior persists after release from incarceration, it is important to understand why changes do or do not occur. These explanations are most robust when they are grounded in theory and supported with empirical evidence.
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The following section first focuses on research findings and theories related to post-release criminal offending, before proceeding to measures of desistance from crime and alternative conceptions of reentry success. We do not distinguish between different methods of measuring post-release offending, although readers are encouraged to bear in mind that studies are highly variable with respect to whether post-release offending is measured from self-report instruments or criminal history repositories; whether it is defined 1 The risk paradigm is prominent among scholars and practitioners in the correctional field, where risk instruments are commonly used to match returning individuals to particular supervision conditions or to particular treatment services, based on their predicted likelihood of recidivism.
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From page 71... ...
. Personal Risk Factors Among the so-called "static" risk factors -- static because they are either not subject to change or are not amenable to intervention -- age and criminal history are among the most salient correlates of post-release criminal behavior (Andrews et al., 1990; Gendreau et al., 1996)
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. Two examples of dynamic risk factors include substance use or abuse and serious mental illness, both of which have been the subject of studies of post-release criminal offending.5 Substance use is a major correlate of criminal offending in general (see Tonry and Wilson, 1990, and 2 A complication is that criminal history is also correlated with sentencing -- individuals with more extensive or more serious prior records are sentenced to longer lengths of confinement, other things equal.
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. In summary, existing research finds that both static and dynamic risk factors are reliable correlates of post-release criminal behavior.
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According to this view, some post-release criminal offending results from societal reactions to the incarcerated individual. The act of the criminal legal system 9 Evidence related to the confinement experience is also available from studies comparing the use of custodial sanctions versus probation or some other form of diversion on post-release criminal offending (for informative reviews, see Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson, 2009; Petrich et al., 2021)
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From page 75... ...
refers to this as the development of "criminal capital" that might not be easily shed by returning individuals.10 Research on the prison environment supports the possibility that prisons can be "schools of crime." For example, there is some suggestion that individuals who have committed the same type of criminal offense experience reinforcing peer effects, thus increasing the chance of post-release criminal offending with that offense type after release (Bayer, Hjalmarsson, and Pozen, 2009; for null peer effects, see Harris et al., 2018)
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From page 76... ...
Ecological Influences Ecological frameworks for explaining post-release criminal behavior focus attention on characteristics of communities to which individuals return. Individuals reentering the community from prison concentrate in neighborhoods characterized by higher-than-average levels of economic disadvantage, residential instability, and racial heterogeneity.12 And just as crime rates are correlated with these indicators of local ecology, criminal offending of formerly incarcerated individuals tends to correlate with neighborhood context.
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From page 77... ...
If some returning individuals settle in neighborhoods with high rates of concentrated disadvantage, then their repeat offending is partly a consequence of a setting that lacks the capacity to exert informal social control over unwanted behavior. A less obvious facet of social disorganization is rooted in coercive mobility, the idea that the regular removal of residents from a community results in instability.
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From page 78... ...
. Indeed, supervision regimes that merely emphasize intensive surveillance through frequent contacts and drug tests have no impact on new arrests, but do increase the likelihood of technical violations and thus reincarceration due to revocation (Petersilia and Turner, 1993; Schiraldi and Arzu, 2018)
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. Moreover, when individuals on supervision feel they can trust their officer and that the officer is fair, their outcomes include less post-release offending and fewer technical violations (Skeem et al., 2007; Taxman and Ainsworth, 2009; Taxman and Thanner, 2004)
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. In addition to concrete success markers such as employment and housing, formerly incarcerated people who participated in the committee's information-gathering sessions emphasized social-psychological processes.
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At the same time, they shared accounts of obstacles they encountered during reentry, such as the denial of jobs and housing because they had to "check the box" and other experiences of discrimination related to their criminal record, gender or racial identity, social class, or other characteristics. Regardless of their intrinsic feelings of self-worth, formerly incarcerated persons are burdened by stigma attached to them by society.
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From page 82... ...
That is, incarceration, monetary sanctions, and other civil disabilities actually impede successful reintegration. Formerly incarcerated people and those with felony-level criminal records face severe restrictions on their work, family, and civic participation due in part to the "invisible punishment" (Travis, 2002)
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. In addi tion, due to federal policies and local practices that deny assistance to individuals convicted of a drug felony offense, many criminal legal system-involved individuals face unique barriers to obtaining housing assistance.
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Criminal legal institutions, reentry programs, and other agencies that serve individuals returning from prison can thus be evaluated, in part, based on their success in improving participant and victim outcomes in a set of domains central to overall well-being. The following section reviews existing research on key domains of support and strain in the reintegration process.15 Effective programming and services support successful reentry in each of these domains by implementing validated assessments, effective cognitive-behavioral therapy and treatment, individually tailored case plans, behavioral incentives, and graduated sanctions.
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From page 85... ...
Multiple leaders noted that their offices are moving away from a sole em phasis on recidivism and focusing on measures of stability and progress in terms of stable housing, regular employment, educational attainments, prosocial involvement with family and community, and participation in drug treatment and other behavioral health services, to name a few metrics that were commonly high lighted. The individuals we spoke with also saw value in the inclusion of subjective assessments from individuals released from prison, such as how successful they believe they will be upon release, and how they feel they have been treated by program and service providers post-release.
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From page 86... ...
Research indicates that formerly incarcerated individuals who are employed have a lower likelihood of post-release criminal offending (Berg and Huebner, 2011; Griffin and Armstrong, 2003; Huebner and Cobbina, 2007; Link, Ward, and Strassfield, 2019; Listwan et al., 2013; MacKenzie and Li, 2002)
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. Although it is difficult to disentangle the effects of incarceration from the preexisting characteristics of those who are incarcerated, the criminal legal system itself plays a part in disconnecting formerly incarcerated people from family and other social institutions (see reviews in Kirk and Wakefield, 2018; National Research Council, 2014; Wakefield and Uggen, 2010)
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From page 88... ...
.17 In a 10-year follow-up study of 400 individuals released from South Carolina prisons, family members were often mentioned as factors that made respondents less likely to engage in criminal behavior. Rebuilding family relationships and being around people not involved in criminal 17 This does not include marital status, which is generally uncorrelated with post-release of fending (Bellair and Kowalski, 2011; Listwan et al., 2013)
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Likewise, suc cessful reentry can be facilitated by allocating sufficient resources to appropriate community-based programming and support structures around employment, edu cation, housing, and health care. SOURCE: Committee on Evaluating Success Among People Released from Prison, Meeting #2.
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In general, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals have an elevated risk of experiencing a diverse set of chronic health conditions compared with the general population (Massoglia and Pridemore, 2015)
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The employment of formerly incarcerated people to provide peer support, assistance, and advocacy in rehabilitation and reentry programs provides benefits not only to the program participants, but also to those providing the peer support. Applying differential association theory to rehabilitation programming, Cressey (1965, p.
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George Braucht, who heads a peer recovery program consultancy called Brauchtworks in Georgia, noted, "fundamentally what's missing from most re entry programs are people with lived experience who meet with the staff and the returning citizens," whom he called "peer-roes." Jai Diamond, a formerly incarcerated transgender woman working at the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, explained why it is valuable to have pro gram providers from diverse backgrounds: "We need to get the people that work in these institutions to look more like the communities that they're serving. There is too much of a cultural difference between the two to build any trust." Kara Nelson, Director of Public Relations and Development at True North Recovery in Alaska, explained, "those with lived experience need to [be able to]
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. This relationship holds when analysis accounts for prior criminal history and when self-report crime data is used in place of official arrest records (Larson and Uggen, 2017)
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While there has been no comprehensive review of the considerable policy and legislative efforts that have been orchestrated and championed by formerly incarcerated individuals and their supporters, people with histories of incarceration have been intimately involved in advocating for criminal legal system reform initiatives, such as police body cameras, alternatives to incarceration, expanding access to health care and therapeutic services for people in correctional custody, and eliminating parole revocations for technical parole violations (Felsenthal, 2018; Rafei, 2021; Sonnenberg, 2017)
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. Individuals who have participated in Inside-Out have gone on to create programs, pursue post-secondary education in and out of prison, and engage in scholarship to improve the system and enhance the lives of people involved in the criminal legal system by informing policy makers (Wright, 2020)
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While much of the work on reentry generally focuses on changing individual attitudes and behaviors, it is limited by ignoring the constraints imposed by social structure and policies. A lack of reentry success is not only a criminal justice problem, it is also an employment problem, housing problem, and mental health problem (Wright, Morse, and Sutton, 2021)
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Our objective here is to draw attention to the shortcomings of "one size fits all" approaches to the measurement of success in research, policy, and reentry programing, and to highlight why it is important to recognize and address reentering individuals' experiences, concerns, and needs in a culturally responsive manner to assess their success. In addition to being more accurate and informative, improved measurement of structural barriers to success has the
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. Furthermore, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities have historically experienced oppression and discrimination not only in the criminal BOX 3-5 Slavery and the Origins of the Criminal Legal System The effects of Black people enslavement transmitted through generations has been labeled by many scholars as the Residual Effects of Slavery (Akbar, 1996; Wilkins et al., 2013)
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. Throughout this era, the police and the criminal legal system played an important part in enforcing Jim Crow laws and segregation (Jett, 2021)
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. Stigma, lack of employment, and lack of family support can serve as barriers to successful integration back into society for Black formerly incarcerated individuals (Williams, Wilson, and Bergeson, 2019)
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. Native Americans experience rates of jail and prison incarceration about double that for white Americans, as well as elevated rates of return to prison, mostly for technical violations (Daniel, 2020; Hansen, 2018)
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-involved women are more likely to have histories of childhood and adult abuse and have more serious health problems, higher rates of mental health problems, and substance dependencies than criminal legal system-involved men (Bronson et al., 2017; Harlow, 1999; National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2020; Wolff, Shi, and Siegel, 2009)
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From page 103... ...
For women, these factors also reduced recidivism, but were less important than close relationships with family, romantic partners, and friends, along with number of children. Adult social bonds have been found to inhibit criminal offending for both male and female probationers, but the effects are stronger for women (De Li and MacKenzie, 2003)
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Mothers involved with the criminal legal system face particular maternal hardships and additional stigma and discrimination (Mitchell and Davis, 2019; Gurusami, 2019)
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Third, when Black women avoid their relatives who have a criminal record, they relinquish a central source of support that has been important to African American families, whose members typically rely on each other. Fourth, structural conditions, including joblessness, persistent poverty, and family disruption, can lead to African Americans traveling in small, isolated social networks that prevent the development of strong social supports (Reisig, Holtfreter, and Morash, 2002)
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From page 106... ...
Service providers pointed to research suggesting that crime victims are most satisfied with the criminal legal system when they have meaningful opportunities to participate, regardless of the outcome. Factors that shape a survivor's satisfac tion with the criminal legal system include the way they are treated throughout the process by the system, the amount of control they are given, as well as the
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From page 107... ...
This false dichotomy between criminal offending and victimization has also been formalized through policy and funding structures. For example, in a listening session with the committee, Michelle Garcia of the Washington, D.C., Office of Victims Services and Justice Grants reported that her office had historically been two separate offices referred to in shorthand as "victims" or "perpetrators." Before the offices were combined, victim service providers did not work with individuals with criminal legal system involvement -- Garcia noted that they were not trained or equipped to do so.
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. The false binary of populations viewed as either victims or criminal legal system-involved individuals, coupled with the stigma of having a criminal history, serves as a formidable barrier to healing.
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. Navigating the reentry experience with unaddressed trauma stemming from violence can result in serious negative outcomes for persons released from prison, including criminal involvement and technical violations that send them back to prison (Hastings and Kall, 2020)
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I've almost called it like a detox period. The way people detox from drugs and alcohol they have to detox from the experience of incarceration." SOURCE: Committee on Evaluating Success Among People Released from Prison Meeting #2: Public Information Gathering Session (July 27, 28, 2021)
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. However, an analysis of 2002–2011 Rehabilitation Services Administration data also showed particularly high rates of mental disabilities among Black people in prison (Baloch and Jennings, 2019)
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. When individuals with mental disabilities leave prison without sufficient medication supplies, access to mental health and support services, and housing, they may struggle post-release, resulting in technical violations or commission of new crimes.
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. Due to discrimination and low levels of human capital, formerly incarcerated individuals, Black people, and women are disproportionately represented among workers in the secondary labor market characterized by low paying, insecure, dead-end jobs (Martin, 2011)
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Yet to date, standard methods of measuring success among those released from prison have not accounted for the varied, significant, and systemic differences in barriers to reintegration. CONCLUSION In outlining the theoretical rationale for looking beyond recidivism and identifying the barriers to success, the foregoing discussion raises a critical question: What do we know or need to learn about reentry success beyond recidivism?
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As this chapter has demonstrated, advancing the measurement of success for individuals released from prison is far beyond a methodological issue. Improving our methods for evaluating success also requires theoretical and conceptual work -- shifting from a recidivism frame to a desistance frame in measuring criminal legal system outcomes and expanding our understanding of success to encompass the life domains central to successful reintegration and overall well-being.
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Looking beyond recidivism as a measure of successful reintegration. The Prison Journal 100, 4, 488–509.
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Women & Criminal Justice 26, 3, 212–231. Baker, D
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. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II.
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Committee on Evaluating Success Among People Released from Prison Meeting #2: Public Information Gather ing Session. Washington, D.C.: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
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. Social support as an organizing concept for criminology: Presidential address to the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
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Journal of Criminal Justice 42, 3, 267–275. Dowden, C., and Andrews, D.A.
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Committee on Evaluating Success Among People Re leased from Prison Meeting #2: Public Information Gathering Session. Washington, DC: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
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Justice Quarterly 20, 2, 213–239. Gurusami, S
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American Journal of Criminal Justice 44, 3, 353–375. Hipp, J.R., Petersilia, J., and Turner, S
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. Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice.
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Committee on Evaluating Success Among People Released from Prison Meeting #2: Public Information Gathering Session. Washington, DC: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
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Criminal Justice and Behavior 41, 4, 471–491. Lynch, S.M., DeHart, D.D., Belknap, J., and Green, B.L.
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Journal of Criminal Justice 36, 416–425. Melton, A.P., Joshua, L., and Melton, D.J.
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