Prisoner Reentry, Parole Violations, and the Persistence of the Surveillance State.

[摘要] The revolving door of the state and federal prison system may be the most persistentchallenge faced by criminological practitioners and scholars. Following release fromcustody, the majority of former prisoners end up back in the system within three years,suggesting that correctional involvement is not an isolated incident for most offenders.Through its analysis of parole violations and sanctions, the current dissertation projectoffers important new insights on this ;;revolving door” between prisons and high-riskcommunities. To do so, each of three empirical chapters looks at a different phase in thecycle of recidivism: offending behavior, institutional responses to offending behavior,and the consequences of institutional sanctions for offenders’ well-being. The firstanalytic chapter examines how geographical proximity to social service providers isrelated to the risk of recidivism. The findings suggest that the observed impact ofcontextual conditions on recidivism depends on how expansively one defines the;;community” in which parolees are embedded and further demonstrates the importanceof capturing the effect of service accessibility on offending behavior within the largerecological context of where parolees live. The second analytic chapter explores how;;supervision regimes,” the legal, political, and cultural factors that shape the waysupervision is practiced across jurisdictions, influence the risk of recidivism. The analysisdemonstrates that regional and county-level attributes shape local templates for decisionmakingamong parole officers in ways that affect not only whether parolees are revokedto prison, but also the use of alternative sanctions, such as stricter community supervision and incarceration in short-term correctional facilities such as jails or detention centers.The final analytic chapter offers a rigorous assessment of the causal impact ofincarceration on labor market outcomes through an examination of whether return toshort-term custody interferes with the ability of parolees to find and maintain work.Findings indicate that the experience of short-term re-incarceration dramatically increasesthe risk of unemployment among parolees in the months during and following theirincarceration. Taken as a whole, the analyses shed light on how offending behavior,institutional decision-making, and the experience of incarceration combine to perpetuatethe cycle of recidivism.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] recidivism

[关键词] prisoner reentry;recidivism;community corrections;back-end sentencing;unemployment;Social Work;Sociology;Social Sciences;Social Work and Sociology