
Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison?  A new study suggests they don't - nickalewis
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/10/why_do_so_many_prisoners_end_up_back_in_prison_a_new_study_says_maybe_they.html
======
tyingo
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...

~~~
danieltillett
If you choose to serve out your sentence in full do you still have to go
through all these different fees and classes?

Do all felons have to have SR-22 insurance or only those convicted of vehicle
offences?

~~~
tyingo
You can choose to serve the full sentence, and you would not have all of the
fees, but you would still have some...like reimbursement of court costs.
You're also subject to some classes. Drug offenders, in some states, have to
take classes if they want their driver's license back. (even if the offense
was not vehicle related in any way).

It's also not a trivial trade-off. Varies by state, but in Texas, for example,
you could be choosing between 2.5 years + probation or 5 full years.

Not all felons need SR-22 insurance, but many whose offenses were NOT vehicle
related have to have it. Drug convictions, for example, even if it had nothing
at all to do with a vehicle.

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srgseg
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%.

~~~
srgseg
To expand on their mall analogy: There is a big difference between asking
"what percentage of this week's mall visitors will return next week", and
asking "when people visit this mall for the first time, what percentage of
them will return the following week".

~~~
gsibble
So the difference in their studies is what percentage of first time offenders
will return to prison vs. what percentage of overall prisoners will return to
prison?

~~~
Abraln
Seems more like one counts (Number of prison stays)/(people who have gone to
prison), while the other counts (people who have gone to prison more than
once)/(The number of people who have gone to prison in total)

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tptacek
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](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.

~~~
ncallaway
While it may not be the principal account for incarceration rates, the paper
does note that 17% of the current prison population is in prison on drug-
related charges. Additionally, it notes that 20% of the growth in prison
populations can be attributed to drug-related charges, and that about 20% of
the flow of prisoners can be attributed to drug-related charges.

That 20% number is still a _massive_ number of people incarcerated on drug-
related charges. It's still a massive problem and solving it will put a huge
dent in the insane incarceration rate that we see.

Of course a problem as large as the over-incarceration of the US population is
going to be complicated and is going to require many solutions rather than a
single silver bullet. I'm all for prosecutorial reform as well as drug reform;
I'm willing to bet I'll need to discover several other things that we need to
reform in order to bring our incarceration rates down.

Put another way, if I'm optimizing some code and I see 20% of CPU-time is
being spent on a trivial operation that is definitely a section of the code
that I'm going to evaluate and attempt to readdress even if it doesn't fully
resolve the performance issues.

~~~
gsibble
If the CPU usage of my code jumped by a massive percentage, and only 20% of it
can be attributed to one problem, I'm certainly going to pay attention to it.
But I'm going to pay a lot more attention to the problems causing the other
80%.

~~~
scottshepard
Not if the 20% was the single largest individual process sucking up power.

~~~
jccc
And whose solution was simple (even if not immediately easy to achieve).

[Edit for focus: And whose solution was obvious.]

------
VLM
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.

------
kenjackson
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.

------
jessriedel
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.

~~~
Camillo
Welcome to sociology.

------
_dps
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](http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=107)

~~~
Camillo
Well, of course. Criminals tend to commit multiple crimes. Would you prefer a
world where crimes are just randomly committed by anyone, including you and
your family, with uniform distribution? If you would, you know where to start.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Kind of a cop out answer. Obviously some recidivism is caused by some people
being predisposed to crime, but when some countries have recidivism rates that
are half of other countries' rates, can you really claim that it explains all
of it?

------
Overtonwindow
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.

------
erikb
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.

~~~
jqgatsby
It is related, and is called the inspection paradox. Identified for me by
Allen Downey, with some explanation below:

[http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2015/11/recidivism-and-
singl...](http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2015/11/recidivism-and-single-case-
probabilities.html?showComment=1448932959307#c8157557553082969443)

------
jeffmould
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.

