"The Misleading Math of ‘Recidivism’"

The title of this post is the headline of this effective recent piece of reporting and analysis by Dana Goldstein for The Marshall Project.  Here are excerpts:

Recidivism, the rate at which former inmates run afoul of the law again, is one of the most commonly accepted measures of success in criminal justice.... [But] recidivism, though constantly discussed, can be widely interpreted — and misinterpreted....

In some studies, violating parole, breaking the law, getting arrested, being convicted of a crime, and returning to prison are all considered examples of recidivism. Other studies count just one or two of these events as recidivism, such as convictions or re-incarceration.

When the federal government calculates a state’s recidivism rate, it uses sample prisoner populations to tally three separate categories: rearrests, reconvictions, and returns to prison, all over a one- to five-year period from the date of release. In contrast, a widely cited 2011 survey from the Pew Center on the States relied on states’ own reporting of just one of those measures: the total number of individuals who returned to prison within three years.

Both the federal and Pew statistics leave out an entire group of former prisoners: those who break the law but don’t get caught. That’s why some recidivism research ... relies on subjects’ self-reports of illegal activity.

Another inconsistency across recidivism studies is the period of time they cover. Though three to five years is considered the gold standard, many studies examine a much smaller time frame. One recent study claimed that a parenting program for prisoners in Oregon reduced recidivism by 59 percent for women and 27 percent for men. But the study tracked program participants for only a single year after they left prison. The likelihood of reoffending does decrease after one year. But according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an additional 13 percent of people will be rearrested four years after their release....

In its 2011 Brown v. Plata decision, the U.S. Supreme Court cited California’s stratospherically high recidivism rates (according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, close to 70 percent of former inmates in the state return to jail or prison within three years of release) as evidence that California prisons do not rehabilitate, but instead “produce additional criminal behavior.” The justices blamed recidivism on overcrowding and the lack of adequate medical services behind bars, and ruled those conditions unconstitutional. The ruling required California to decrease its prison population.

But what if the court’s take on the causes of California’s high recidivism rate is wrong? What if it isn’t primarily prison overcrowding that causes reoffending, but an overly punitive parole system — the same trend that drives the majority of recidivism in New York? That’s what the data shows. Parolees in California are actually less likely than parolees in New York or Illinois to commit a new crime. Yet they are exponentially more likely to be arrested and sent back behind bars for violating the conditions of their parole, according to an analysis of BJS data from researcher Ryan G. Fischer. California law punishes technical parole violations with a few days to four months in a county jail or state prison....

[U]sing federal recidivism data for inmates who left state prisons in 1994, parole violations accounted for the entirety of the gap between California’s recidivism rate and the recidivism rates of other large states. In other words: Because of the differences in how states and localities enforce parole, recidivism rates tell us little about the reoccurrence of the types of crimes with which the public is most concerned: crimes that have a victim.