Of Course Recidivism Is High When Everything Is a Crime

A new report released this week from the Bureau
of Justice Statistics indicates that slightly more than
three-quarters of released prisoners will end up arrested again
within five years.

The report has not gotten a whole lot of attention, though
Caitlin Dickson delves into the stats over at The Daily
Beast and tries to draw out some meaning. After noting that
rearrest doesn’t mean these people end up back in prison (that
number is much more modest, less than 30 percent),
she spoke with some college experts:

CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor Deborah
Koetzle … hopes that the drastic numbers will spark more
conversation about the need for rehabilitation and re-entry
programs to combat recidivism.

“In a lot of ways we set people up because we put them in
prisons, which are are coercive, violent environments that can have
psychological impacts, and when they come out we put up a lot of
barriers,” Koetzle told The Daily Beast. “We make it difficult for
them to get jobs, to find housing. We put them back in an
environment where there’s a lot of temptations without a lot of
support.”

Koetzle argues that most correctional facilities are not
equipped with the types of psychological or substance abuse
treatment programs many inmates need, making it unsurprising when
people come home and get into trouble again.

“We spend a lot of money incarcerating people and it’s not a
very efficient way of doing things unless we’re providing
treatment,” Koetzle said. “We should to look at these figures and
think, there is a reason for this. We need to do a better job.”

Having lived in and run a newspaper in a small
town for a decade and having watched regular “probation sweeps”
from law enforcement agencies looking for any reason to drag
ex-offenders back to jail, I immediately wondered exactly what
kinds of crimes were getting these people rearrested. I thumbed
through the full 31-page
report (pdf) and found what I was looking further in. Fully a
quarter of rearrests included probation or parole violations. More
than 38 percent were rearrested for drug-related violations. The
chart on the right shows the distribution of charges for
recidivists.

Because arrests may involve several different charges, the
totals add up to more than 100 percent and we can’t really
determine the number of people arrested for “public order” or
probation violations who were also charged with violent or property
crimes from the chart. We can see, though, that the majority of
rearrests involve these public order violations, the greatest
percentage falling under the “other” category. The report
classifies these crimes as “those that violate the peace or order
of the community or threaten the public health or safety through
unacceptable conduct, interference with governmental authority, or
the violation of civil rights or liberties. The category also
includes probation or parole violation, escape, obstruction of
justice, court offenses, nonviolent sex offenses, commercialized
vice, family offenses, liquor law violations, bribery, invasion of
privacy, disorderly conduct, contributing to the delinquency of a
minor, and other miscellaneous and unspecified categories.”

What does it say about our criminal justice system when only 28
percent of our repeat criminals are committing violent crimes, only
38 percent are committing property crimes, but 40 percent of them
are falling in this catch-all category of “other” crimes that are
so extensive that even a report full of statistics for recidivism
isn’t able to account for them all?