A Public Administration Headache: An Evaluation Analysis of Prison Policy and Recidivism Toward Social Reintegration

Abstract

We focus on discovering, describing, and understanding prison recidivism; secondly, we intend to know if the prison policy contributes to deterrence of crime; thirdly, we want to know if prison labor and vocational education and training influence the rate of prison recidivism by increasing social reintegration or decreasing prison recidivism. We use a sample of n = 1643 prisoners, multivariate clustering methods, focusing on latent class models, to trace the profile of prisoners, and we use the chi-square test to test dependence/independence of some variable pairs. Data support the heterogeneity of inmates, resulting in two clusters, recidivists (50%), and nonrecidivists.

Keywords:

• prison policy
• public administration
• public policy
• recidivism
• social reintegration

ORCID

Jaime R. S. Fonseca

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2549-5823