Anyone know where I can get good information on the internet about prison recedivism rates in the US?
-Kris
yeah, look it up on Google and you’ll get a number of hits which will send you lots of good places. But you’ll have to spell it correctly. Recidivism.
US Dept of justice has lots of info, however you need to understand what/how they collect the data.
From what I recall, they don’t necessarily collect every piece of data available from everywhere. and from being in the ‘biz’, the term ‘recidivism’ doesn’t necessarily have a single definition.
For example - most folks think of it in terms of “did the person go back to prison”, but that would include parole violations, not necessarily new criminal activity.
also, the length of time should be defined (return to prison w/in 6 months? 1 year? 5 years? etc.).
Also, in some cases, we might care if the person commits a different type of offense (granting of course, that we don’t want them committing any).
what specifically are you looking for (specific type of crime? type of offender? area?)
I got a few hits with the misspelling, so I thought I must be spelling it right but the info was not forthcoming.
So, thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I’ll go try again.
-Kris
I have some data, admittedly limited in scope, and I’d have to get an OK from the folks for whom I did the data analysis (although I don’t anticipate a problem there, they’d be glad you were interested).
The upshot: community service lowers recidivism rates for misdemeanants, all other factors being equal, but fails to have a meaningful effect on the recidivism rate of felons.
Two spoilers:
a) People convicted of felony crimes are more likely to have been convicted of prior crimes (sorry, raw data no longer available to support this)–and given the nature of the dependent variable, this seems meaningful
b) People considered by informal, unofficial standards (unmeasurable since not recorded) to be a low risk for recidivism were, according to 6 Nassau County / Suffolk County / Queens NYC judges in interviews, more likely to receive sentences of community service.
My general sense of criminal justice is in keeping with my primary finding (although I’d have liked to be able to demonstrate that it was applicable to felons as well) but I think, as a fledgling researcher, that the whole works is too contaminated by extraneous causes that cannot be controlled for in the data to be useful in expressing my sentiments.