Abstract
This article explores the main determinants of the hazard of recidivism among ex-prisoners. We use a nationally-representative sample of prisoners released in 1996–1997 in France, drawn from a 5-year follow-up survey run by the French correctional administration. We estimate semi-parametric duration models which deal with violations of the proportional hazards assumption. Our results confirm the importance of gender, age, nationality, employment status and prior convictions on recidivism within 5 years after release from prison. We also find significant differences in hazards of recidivism by type of initial offense, penal status at entry, and type of release (early release under parole, etc.), while controlling for prison fixed effects. Finally, our study casts doubt on the influence of several sociodemographic variables (marital status at entry, education, homelessness) and on the effectiveness of semi-liberté as a way to prevent recidivism.
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Notes
Official monthly statistics can be obtained at www.justice.gouv.fr/prison-et-reinsertion-10036/les-chiffres-clefs-10041/statistiques-mensuelles-de-la-population-detenue-et-ecrouee-24982.html.
In this study, the term “recidivism” only stands for “re-conviction”, i.e. the fact that an ex-prisoner commits a new offense and is re-convicted after release.
See Svensson et al. (2013) for an empirical study of the role of moral values, anticipated shame and guilt on juvenile delinquency in the Netherlands.
See Zamble and Quinsey (1997).
See Kubrin and Stewart (2006) for the first empirical investigation on the subject.
See Manski (2000)’s classification of social interactions.
While attractive, these methods necessitate very long follow-up periods (a decade or more) to distinguish those who are at risk (called persisters) from those who would never recidivate (desisters). Therefore most follow-up surveys do not allow for the use of such methods.
653 criminal records could not be retrieved or used for one of the following reasons: un-matched identity, deceased, incomplete record, recording error. One record was not used because it reflected a very special case of incarceration (“contrainte par corps”).
See Kensey and Tournier (2002) for a detailed summary of time served among this sample.
These two French legal measures allow a prisoner to go out of prison routinely for several hours or days to do a particular activity, such as working.
When one is convicted for multiple offenses, the category of the most serious crime is used.
The hazard function is smoothed with Epanechnikov’s alternative kernel function.
The causal effect of time served on recidivism is a very debated theoretical and empirical topic. This article does not address this difficult question, but it is important to control for time served in recidivism studies.
The results of these tests are available in Table 3 in the "Appendix".
The log function implies that the effect of an explanatory variable changes over time in a non-linear way, which seems more realistic than a linear function. However, Table 5 in "Appendix" shows the results we obtained with \(f(t) = t\) and \(f(t) = \sqrt{t}\).
See for example Box-Steffensmeier (2004) for more details on this method. Noteworthy is the fact that this approach leads to very similar results to those obtained with a Generalized Weibull model, when the time dependency parameter \(p\) is a function of the variables \(Z\).
Hazard ratios are obtained by computing \(exp(\hat{\beta })\).
Because \(exp(\frac{\hat{\beta }_{gender}}{\hat{\theta }_{gender}}) = exp(\frac{\ln {0.309}}{\ln {1.333}}) = 57\) days.
This figure is obtained as follows: \(\frac{\hat{h}_{age=30}}{\hat{h}_{age=20}} = \frac{exp(30 \cdot \hat{\beta }_{age} + 30^2 \cdot \hat{\beta }_{age^2})}{exp(20 \cdot \hat{\beta }_{age} + 20^2 \cdot \hat{\beta }_{age^2})} = 0.54\).
For a discussion of the causal effect of time served, see Sect. 2.
In France, parolees are supervised by probation officers after release, for a period equal (at least) to the remainder of their prison sentence.
There is selection bias if parolees (treatment group) differ significantly from the others (control group) in terms of unobservable characteristics that affect the probability of being released under parole (such as motivation, reentry prospects, etc.).
Semi-liberté and placement à l’extérieur both allow prisoners to leave prison during day hours or several consecutive days to achieve a particular task (such as work or training). The different results between these two measures may be due to the fact that placement à l’extérieur is much more selective (2 vs 8 % of the sample) and that it generally allows longer out-of-prison spells.
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Acknowledgments
The dataset was obtained from the French correctional administration (DAP) and the Ministry of Justice and Freedoms. I am deeply grateful to Annie Kensey from the DAP for her precious help in obtaining the data. I also thank my supervisor Jean-Yves Lesueur for his support and his comments during this research project. All opinions and remaining errors are my own.
The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.
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Monnery, B. The determinants of recidivism among ex-prisoners: a survival analysis on French data. Eur J Law Econ 39, 37–56 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-014-9442-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-014-9442-3