Hypothesis: At least fifty percent of people convinced of serious crimes and sent to prison will commit additional crimes and be returned to prison. In May of 2004, the United States Sentencing Commission issued a report on the re-arrest, re-conviction, and re-incarceration of former inmates who were tracked for three years after their release from prison in 1994. This study of recidivism found that of the nearly 300,000 prisoners released in 15 States in 1994, 67.5% were re-incarcerated within 3 years.
The report contained the following additional information:
Released prisoners with the highest re-arrest rates were burglars at 74.0%, larcenists at 74.6%, those in prison for possessing or selling stolen property at 77.4%, and motor vehicle thieves with a recidivism rate of 78.8%.
Within three years, 2.5% of released rapists were arrested for another rape.
1.2% of individuals who had served time for homicide were arrested for another homicide.
The 272,111 offenders discharged in 1994 had accumulated 4.1 million arrest charges before their most recent imprisonment and had been charged with another 744,000 crimes within three years of release ("Measuring Recidivism: The Criminal history computation of the federal sentencing guidelines. May 2004. United States Sentencing Commission" Online).
John Irwin writes in his book The Felon that many of the problems associated with recidivism have to do with the reentry into society. Irwin concluded that there was little indication either from the literature or from interviews of persons involved in dealing with parolees of the existence of any awareness of the broader aspects of the reentry problem. This general blindness seems to be related to formal and informal societal conceptions of the ex-convict.
When Irwin wrote his book in 1970, the U.S. prison population was only 200,000. This year, more than three times that number of convicts will be released from prison. In ...