Tag: recidivism

A radical new approach to measuring recidivism risk

NOTE: This post has been updated as of 4/2 to incorporate additional research. Researchers at the RAND Corporation have proposed a radical new approach to measuring recidivism risk that raises questions about decades of received truth about the prevalence of reoffending after people leave prison.  At least since the 1990s, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has measured risk of recidivism at the time of a person’s last interaction with the justice system, when the statistical cohort includes many who are frequent participants in the criminal system as well as those for whom it is a one-time affair.  As a result, employers and others tend to interpret background checks as overstating the risk posed by someone who in fact may have been living in the community for years without criminal incident, and is unlikely to become criminally involved again. In Providing Another Chance: Resetting Recidivism Risk in Criminal Background Checks, Shawn Bushway and his RAND colleagues argue that risk should instead be measured at the time a background check is conducted, after an individual has had an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to reintegrate lawfully as well as their propensity to reoffend.  They label this the “reset principle,” and argue that this more individualized approach to risk assessment promises to improve the predictive value of criminal background checks.  In fact, they propose that it will “strengthen the case that people with convictions can, and usually do, change their ways.” Coupled with other studies showing that the risk of recidivism depends on a variety of factors (e.g., age at time of offense), this new RAND study suggests that general “time to redemption” research should not be relied upon to predict future behavior of specific individuals. The premise of the “reset principle” seems reasonable and even self-evident once explained.  And, if models based on the reset principle are developed into viable tools that employers and others can use to assess recidivism risk, these models may offer many with criminal histories a way to demonstrate that they should be offered another chance.  But there is a good reason why this has not already been done: it has been hard to identify data that would account for a sufficiently long period of time that an individual spends free in the community after their last interaction with the criminal justice system to accurately measure risk of reoffending. As Bushway and his colleagues point out, this sort of data collection requires long-term surveillance that implicates issues of privacy. The large data set from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety allowed the researchers to measure the frequency with which people who have a conviction are reconvicted over a ten-year period, how quickly their likelihood of reoffending declines, and how their risk profiles change.  They reached three highly significant conclusions based on the North Carolina data: The majority of individuals with a conviction do not have a subsequent conviction. A person’s likelihood of being convicted again declines rapidly as more time passes After a sufficient period without a new conviction, even people initially deemed to be at highest risk for recidivism (such as those with a more extensive criminal background) transition to risk levels that appear similar to those initially at the lowest risk. The RAND researchers caution that “prediction models that work in a specific context are not guaranteed to work in other contexts,” and that “there is no one-size-fits-all solution.” With that caveat, based on their conclusions respecting the North Carolina data, they make a series of recommendations: Policymakers should recognize that, over an extended sampling period, most people who get convicted are not reconvicted. This provides a fact base for policymaking that differs from findings by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that articulate that, in a given cohort of people released from prison (e.g., in a given year), most people experience another conviction. Updates to the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures can validate a new class of models, such as those that satisfy the reset principle, providing employers a more certain defense to challenges to their employment decisions. Policymakers and other decisionmakers should make determinations about risk thresholds that are applied in a particular setting (e.g., an employer deciding how much recidivism risk is appropriate for a given job description) because those thresholds implicate issues of equity and fairness. Data quality can limit the development of successful recidivism risk models, and policymakers should consider creating data infrastructure that supports models that adhere to the reset principle. Policymakers should understand that exploring and stressing models that adhere to the reset principle for bias will be crucial. Model predictions may reflect the unfair systemic biases in the current criminal justice system. Tools that use models that adhere to the reset principle should be developed judiciously and after carefully considering many systemic factors regarding fairness. An adequate assessment of bias should include a comparison to the current state. Even an imperfect tool could provide more opportunities to candidates against whom the current system is biased than the current methods. This research was sponsored by Arnold Ventures and conducted by the RAND Justice Policy Program. Read more

Reentry efforts undermined by collateral consequences

Author: Art Beeler Editor’s note: Earlier this week Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that The Justice Department has christened the week of April 24-30 “National Reentry Week.”  In the announcement, the Attorney General highlighted  “the major steps [taken by the Obama administration] to make our criminal justice system more fair, more efficient, and more effective at reducing recidivism and helping formerly incarcerated individuals contribute to their communities.”  The announcement prompted Art Beeler, a former warden in the federal correctional system and current member of the North Carolina Sentencing Commission, to consider the place that collateral consequences ought to have in our national dialog about reentry, recidivism, and public safety. As a warden with the Federal Bureau of Prisons for more than twenty years, I know that successful evidence-based reentry programs are essential if we are going to reduce recidivism and increase public safety.  So it was with great interest that I read U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s letter celebrating reentry week.  I applaud the growing focus on reentry programming, which is essential, but I believe that we must acknowledge that we will never achieve the goal of reintegrating those convicted of crimes back into society without fully addressing the problem posed by collateral consequences.  The federal government has already taken some steps a to reevaluate collateral consequences imposed by federal regulations, as the AG notes in her letter, but successful reentry efforts demand a full reevaluation of the intent and effect of collateral consequences at both the federal and state level. Though I have spent much of my career attempting to help those convicted of crimes transition back into society, I did not fully understand the impact of collateral consequences until late in my career.  Their significance hit home when I was giving a tour of the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina to participants of a reentry conference at Duke’s School of Law.  Joining us on the tour was a former inmate who had been invited by the Chief Judge for the Western District of North Carolina.  The man had been barbering for almost twenty years since his release and had no subsequent criminal involvement.  But his twenty-plus year-old federal drug conviction rendered him ineligible for the Small Business Administration he needed to open his own barber shop.  Hearing this, I suddenly became aware that collateral consequences were far more commonplace and restrictive than I had previously assumed. According to the National Inventory of the Collateral Consequences of Conviction (NICCC), there are over 47,000 collateral consequences imposed by state and federal law, many of which make it unnecessarily difficult for prisoners to succeed on the outside.  Most of these laws and rules were enacted with the well-intentioned goal of protecting public safety, but, by posing obstacles to successful reentry, many of these laws have the opposite effect.  I say this based on forty-two years of experience in correctional management, during which I have seen multitudes of prisoners enter, leave, and, all too-often, return to prison. Reducing recidivism requires expanding opportunities to those with criminal records, not reducing them.  My correction colleagues and I would often say, anecdotally, that if the sixty percent in the middle of the normal distribution curve of those released had not found a decent job with a living wage in 90-120 days, then they would likely return to criminal behavior and, inevitably, to prison. The reality underlying that assumption has been borne out in numerous of studies.  Most notably, a RAND study empirically demonstrated that inmate education and vocational training reduces recidivism.  The Second Chance Pell Pilot program (which is experimenting with reversing the 1994 policy barring prisoners from receiving Pell grants to fund college tuition) shows that the Administration recognizes this reality.  Critics of such programs wonder why prisoners should get a free ride while law-abiding citizens pay for their own educational costs.  The answer is simple: Because 95% of prisoners will be returning to the community, and we know that those who are better equipped to succeed pose less risk.  Everyone benefits when we remove the unreasonable barriers limiting opportunities for current and former inmates. But we cannot begin to address the problem posed by collateral consequences until we understand it.  Too many lawyers, legislators, and others involved in the system are unaware of the impact that these civil penalties have on reentry and recidivism, just as I was until fairly recently.   Studies and inventories of collateral consequences, like the NICCC and C-CAT maintained by the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Government here in North Carolina, are working to change that.  But reform requires policy-makers to pay attention.  In the past few years I have written several letters to legislators and policy-makers on the subject of collateral consequences.  Rarely have I received more than a generic response thanking me for my comments.  Hopefully, other interested parties are having better luck raising awareness. Focusing on sentencing reform and reentry programming is important, but they are only two pieces of the puzzle.  By failing to fully review the role of collateral consequences at all levels we are cutting a leg off of a three-legged stool and undercutting our efforts to encourage the success of returning citizens and the safety of our communities. About the Author: Art Beeler is a Clinical Assistant Professor at North Carolina Central University, and a Commissioner with the North Carolina Sentencing Commission. He retired as the Complex Warden at the federal correctional facility in Butner, North Carolina in 2009, after over three decades of service in the federal prison system.]   Read more