Recidivism is alive and doing well, according to a federal study.
The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics conducted a recidivism statistics study from 2005 to 2010 in 30 states. On average, 75 percent of all prisoners released were re-incarcerated within a three- to five-year-period.
Survey
Three out of four inmates are re-incarcerated within five years of release, according to the survey.
“Prisoners released after serving time for a property offense were the most likely to be arrested,” according to the statisticians. Drugs and public order was next, followed closely by violent offenders.
The statistics illustrated that if a prisoner had been arrested more than 10 times, the chances of recidivism were much higher. Statisticians term these inmates as “recidivist.”
Violent Crime
The survey shows that 33.1 percent of violent crime offenders were typically re-arrested for violent crime offenses during this five-year period.
When the statistics are broken down into ages, the under-24 group had the highest rate of five-year recidivism at 84.1 percent, and the over-40 group was lower at 69.2 percent.
A recent background update for the bureau is if they started sharing data with the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS), and the International Justice and Public Safety Network (Nlets) to provide the Department of Justice access to criminal history records as of 2008. A security agreement was executed between these agencies to ensure confidentiality.
Criminal History
Nlets developed the Criminal History Records Information Sharing (CHRIS) automated collection system for statistics bureaus to retrieve nationwide criminal history records.
There are several statistical avenues and logical paths to manipulate these percentages by race, gender, crimes, geographic locations, and states, but they all point to the same average for re-incarceration.
