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March 3, 2020
"Going Back to Jail When You Haven’t Committed a Crime: Early Findings From a Multi-State Trial"
The title of this post is the title of this new report from the Institute for Justice Research and Development (IJRD) prepared by Carrie Pettus-Davis and Stephanie Kennedy. This report is part of a series of quarterly reports designed to provide real-time results of a multistate study on prisoner reentry currently being conducted in over 100 correctional facilities and 21 urban and rural counties in 7 states. The full report itself is a reader-friendly 17 pages, and there is also this one-pager with key takeaways. Here are excerpts from the one-pager:
Although the general public often thinks about recidivism as individuals leaving incarceration and committing new crimes, technical violations contribute to the strikingly high rates of recidivism reported for individuals released from prisons and jails across the United States....
• Research suggests that 45% of the more than 600,000 annual state prison admissions across the nation are due to probation or parole revocations.
• While probation or parole can be revoked for committing new crimes, 26% of new prison admissions are due solely to technical violations. Unpaid fines and fees also contribute to technical violations and may lead individuals back to incarceration.
• Our goal was to explore the circumstance of re-arrest among our study participants. At this early point in the study, data are incomplete or unavailable.
• This report examines the reasons for re-arrest provided by study participants as these data were the most complete. They describe a range of technical violations for expected events — missing check-ins with supervising officers and violating curfew — and unexpected events – being arrested, having one’s charges dropped, and returning to jail for coming into contact with law enforcement. Though not the focus of this report, other common technical violations were related to substance use, carrying guns, and reengagement in crime. We will have more complete data on these rates in the future.
• The 35 individuals highlighted in this report were re-arrested for non-drug related, non-criminal technical violations.
• We ask stakeholders to consider whether current policy and practices are meeting the stated purpose and goals of conditional release. Are the non-criminal behaviors described in this report reason enough to send someone to jail? Is it worth the financial costs and associated social costs?
March 3, 2020 at 06:01 PM | Permalink