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Edited by Yu Xie, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved September 1, 2017 (received for review March 13, 2017)
Significance
Between the 1970s and the late 2000s, the United States experienced an enormous rise in incarceration, a substantial portion of which was caused by high rates of return to prison among those previously incarcerated. This study shows that such returns are primarily a product of postprison community supervision rather than criminogenic effects of imprisonment, as many individuals sentenced to prison become trapped in the escalating surveillance and punishment of the criminal justice system. In other words, the rise in incarceration in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was in part a self-perpetuating process resulting from the workings of the criminal justice system itself.
Abstract
A substantial contributor to prison admissions is the return of individuals recently released from prison, which has come to be known as prison’s “revolving door.” However, it is unclear whether being sentenced to prison itself has a causal effect on the probability of a subsequent return to prison or on criminal behavior. To examine the causal effect of being sentenced to prison on subsequent offending and reimprisonment, we leverage a natural experiment using the random assignment of judges with different propensities for sentencing offenders to prison. Drawing on data on all individuals sentenced for a felony in Michigan between 2003 and 2006, we compare individuals sentenced to prison to those sentenced to probation, taking into account sentence lengths and stratifying our analysis by race. Results show that being sentenced to prison rather than probation increases the probability of imprisonment in the first 3 years after release from prison by 18 percentage points among nonwhites and 19 percentage points among whites. Further results show that such effects are driven primarily by imprisonment for technical violations of community supervision rather than new felony convictions. This suggests that more stringent postprison parole supervision (relative to probation supervision) increases imprisonment through the detection and punishment of low-level offending or violation behavior. Such behavior would not otherwise result in imprisonment for someone who had not already been to prison or who was not on parole. These results demonstrate that the revolving door of prison is in part an effect of the nature of postprison supervision.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: dharding{at}berkeley.edu.
Author contributions: D.J.H., J.D.M., and S.D.B. designed research; D.J.H., J.D.M., A.P.N., and S.D.B. performed research; A.P.N. analyzed data; and D.J.H., J.D.M., and S.D.B. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1701544114/-/DCSupplemental.
Imprisonment and recidivism
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