Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison? A new study suggests they don't

I personally know several people that did go back. The common thread was parole and/or probation programs that just weren't achievable.

Requirements vary, but typically there's: - tons of recurring fees (classes, mandatory drug testing, etc) - reimbursement of the court's costs - classes, parole officer, drug testing, etc, located in areas away from public transportation - judges that chronically no-show, after you've paid to get there, parking, etc.

I spoke to one in-depth...it's about $500/month in direct costs, not including indirect costs like transportation. In many areas you would really have to own a vehicle to get to the required places. Which, for a felon, also means "special" high cost SR-22 insurance.

Couple that with the sort of jobs available to a convicted felon, and...

A way of explaining it that (hopefully) makes it clearer:

Let's say you have just invented the concept of prison, and let's say 50% of people come back every year after going to prison for the first time, and 50% never come back again.

In year 2, you'd observe that of the year 1 population, 50% returned, and 50% didn't.

In year 2, you'd also add a new influx of prisoners.

Therefore, in year 3, you'd observe that of the year 2 population, 75% returned and 25% didn't.

But, the real underlying recidivism rate is still 50%, not 75%.

A better source, with a previous HN discussion, that says much the same thing, is far better sourced, and makes a lot of other important points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091586

HN readers will be unhappy to read that the war on drugs is not principally, directly responsible for US incarceration rates.

HN readers will probably thrilled to read that responsibility for over-incarceration is placed squarely on overzealous prosecutors; the rate at which arrestees are charged with felonies has climbed sharply, despite an overall drop in crime.

There is a slight mistake in the article toward the end where the interviewer asks what good the BJS statistics are and the response is polite waffling and its wrong. What its actually extremely useful for is numerical prediction of how many beds you'll need in 10 years so build X prison beds per year etc, based on greater population growth and "repeat customer" rates. I'm not talking about conspiracy level stuff or isn't the prison industrial complex evil signalling, but just predictive numbers. The meta problem that the article does overall get correct is trying to apply "how many beds to build" statistics to "what fraction of prisoners turn their lives around" is totally useless as the interviewee properly states. In that way the BJS stats are awesome for construction budget projections while being simultaneously totally useless for pontificating on cultural problems. The dude interviewed basically gets this correct in long format, only screwing up this one question.

No one else has caught the obvious startup analogy of freemium model whales, AFAIK. Most people playing freemium games do not pay in. On the other hand a huge fraction of freemium revenue comes from whales. Therefore you can make all kinds of weird inaccurate statements about the revenue vs population distribution. Like if all your revenue comes from whales, all your customers must be whales, right? Or all your revenue comes from repeat customers therefore most customers are repeat customers. Strange logic like that.

The article would have been better with actual data. Its unclear to me if the effect is large or small. Seems like it could be either depending on several factors.

The academic discussion of prison sentences and recidivism must be completely dysfunctional if this sort of elementary mistake is derailing things. This is truly a Statistics 101 idea.

While the overrepresentation of the repeat offenders is a valid concern, I feel like this makes a big point out of a relatively small change in conclusion.

  Old Analysis: slightly over half were incarcerated again
  New Analysis: about one third are incarcerated again

So regardless of how you measure it, there's an enormous relative risk of recidivism -- the general population is incarcerated at a mere 0.66% level [1] so that's still a 50x relative risk (compared to a 75x under the old calculation).

There is no avoiding the conclusion that ex-convicts are vastly more likely to perform crimes than the general population. From the perspective of risk management and policy design, 50x vs 75x doesn't seem to change much to me.

And I could forgive a lay person for taking the 50x relative risk to mean "ex convicts tend to return to jail" even if it's "only" 1 in 3. The general rate of incarceration is nowhere near 1 in 3.

[1] http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=107

Interesting article... I think many go back because we set them up for failure during reentry. Housing and jobs can discriminate against those with criminal records, making it difficult to reintegrate with society.

The first thing I think when reading the headline is that friends paradox on social networks. Feels like that. But I don't know if these paradoxes are interrelated.

Like anything with a political undertone, how recidivism rates are calculated is defined by the messenger. A politician wanting to take a hard nose approach to crime is going to want a higher recidivism rate so he/she can say that keeping people in prison reduces crime. On the flip side, the reality is that by providing jobs, education, and general opportunities, upon release there is a less chance that someone will recommit.

The real problem, as someone else pointed out, is that in most cases the individual is set up to fail in the justice system.

I will use myself as an example. I served a one-year supervised felony probation. On the last day of my probation I was cleared by my probation officer. Although technically my probation did not end until midnight, when I met with my probation officer in the morning she gave me a letter stating I had met my obligations and at midnight would be clear from further supervision. I had been planning a move out of the state the following day and in preparation had rented a moving van and was beginning to pack my things. With the van parked in front of my house, an overzealous sheriff deputy who knew I was on probation, stopped to see what was going on. Simply because I had already begun packing the van, he decided he would violate my probation for moving without permission. I was arrested again for a violation and subsequently spent the night in jail until a judge released me the following morning. Luckily my attorney was able to convince the state not to press for additional time and my probation was terminated. It cost me a little over $1000 in additional legal fees (or as my attorney so eloquently put it, do you want me just to play golf with state's attorney or take him to dinner afterwards) for my attorney to handle that for me. I was fortunate enough to be able to afford the costs, however, I have seen first hand how others without the means would have been violated and most likely would have served time or an additional length of probation resulting in additional costs.

While someone else pointed out that high incarceration rates are not entirely to blame on the war on drugs, they are directly related. We live in a society where zero-tolerance laws take precedence over common-sense laws. We incarcerate people at the highest rate in the world. The system is like a giant ponzi scheme. We incarcerate so many people that we have to charge outrageous court and other fees to afford to support the cycle of incarceration. Yet the failure to pay these same fees are often one of the leading reasons that people are violated on probation or parole. We have people serving mandatory sentences for charges that in today's society are no longer crimes. However, if a politician attempts to make a change and get those individuals released they are viewed as being soft on crime. An interesting study would really be a comparison of fees paid to sentence served. I know I was able to essentially pay more in fees to reduce my probation time. Similar to getting a mortgage and paying points up front to reduce your interest rate.