More Than 50% of Felons Return to Prison Within Three Years of Release

Fewer of California’s ex-felons are returning to prison, but they are still committing new crime at a steady rate compared with previous years, an Associated Press report by Don Thompson reveals.
More than 50 percent of felons were back behind prison walls within three years, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. That’s down from 61 percent a year ago and down from a high of 67.5 percent for inmates released a decade ago, according to the AP report.
Under California’s 2011 realignment law, most parole-violators and low-level offenders were sentenced to county jails.
Since the law took effect, arrests of ex-felons ticked up two percentage points and three percentage points for convictions in their first year of release, the AP report continued.
“I don’t think that there’s any strong evidence that realignment is worsening the reoffending (rate),” said researcher Magnus Lofstrom of the Public Policy Institute of California. Part of that is likely due to prosecutors charging more parolees with new crimes instead of relying on parole violations to send offenders to jail for relatively brief periods, added Lofstrom, according to the AP report.
Between July 2009 and June 2010 nearly 105,000 parolees were released over the full three-year period. During the same time period arrests declined slightly and convictions increased by less than half a percentage point, the report stated.
Terry Thornton, CDCR spokeswoman, said one desired effect from the four-year-old law was to reduce the number of parole violators who churn through repeated prison terms so quickly that they cannot take advantage of rehabilitation programs.
Contributing factors to the decline of felons returning to prison include providing substance abuse treatment while in prison. Moreover, California is taking parolees off supervision more quickly, hence they are less likely to be sent to prison for a parole violation than they used to be.