Prison life and strategies to decrease recidivism upon an inmate's release from prison

Prison life & strategies to decrease recidivism upon an inmate's release from prison

Introduction

The U.S. criminal justice system currently incarcerates well over two million people and each year releases over 700,000. Each of these releases entails a trade-off between two significant social costs. On the one hand, keeping an individual in prison is incredibly costly the operating costs of the nation's prisons are nearly $60 billion annually. On the other hand, the costs associated with overly lenient releases are also high given the vastly disproportionate share of crime committed by the newly released for example, past work suggests that individuals released over the previous twelve months account for fourteen percent of all murders. Release policies thus have large consequences in terms of government expense and public safety, and in fact these consequences are likely growing. In 2009 prison releases exceeded admissions for the first time since the Bureau of Justice Statistics began to systematically collect these statistics in 1980, as states are beginning to shrink their prison populations after decades of unprecedented growth.

Moreover, despite the well-documented decrease in the overall crime rate over the past two decades, recidivism rates among ex-inmates have increased over that same period. The growing number of releases along with rising recidivism rates means that ex-inmates are determining a greater share of the overall crime rate. Yet economists, who have long contributed to research on what deters potential criminals in the first place, have paid less attention to how prisoners might be released in a manner that minimizes the costs arising from their incarceration and future recidivism. Release policies that allocate costly prison space to inmate's identified as posing the greatest recidivism risk or that incentivize prisoners to invest in reducing their future recidivism could improve public safety while potentially reducing criminal justice expenditures.

Moreover, the questions involved in formulating such policies how to allocate scarce resources, extract information from noisy signals, and incentivize human capital investments are ones to which economists have traditionally made important contributions. The lack of attention paid to release policy is especially surprising because it has undergone sweeping changes over the past several decades. From the late nineteenth century until recently, a judge typically would assign a convicted to ender an indeterminate sentence (e.g., “ten years to life") and a parole board would eventually decide when, within that range, the prisoner would be released.

Beginning in the 1970s, the political right began to argue that parole boards were overly lenient, while the political left, disillusioned with government authority after Vietnam and Watergate, argued they were discriminatory and corrupt. During this sudden confluence of opinion, less attention was paid to the potential benefits of discretion and a dramatic reshaping of release policy began. In 1980, state and federal parole boards still had the authority to release the large majority prisoners. Today, as the federal government and state after state has moved to fixed-sentences regimes where sentencing decisions are binding, less than ...