The influence of technical violation revocations on parole efficacy: employing competing risks survival analyses to address methodological challenges

ABSTRACT

Failures among the community supervision population are a major contributor to prison populations. Revocations of parole supervision due to technical parole violations (TPRs) often result in the incarceration of a parolee for violating the terms of their supervised release. This study employs several strategies for integrating TPRs into the construct of recidivism, a common outcome measure in correctional evaluations. TPRs are either ignored, combined with rearrest, or treated as a competing risk to rearrest. Each framework is employed to estimate survival rates among multi-year prison release cohorts in which parolee supervision is stratified by actuarial risk level. Results suggest that the way TPRs are integrated into evaluations of parolee recidivistic behavior patterns can influence the magnitude and nature of a study’s results. This is significant as costly policy decisions are often informed by evaluation research focusing on time to failure measures. Methodological and ideological remedies are proposed.

KEYWORDS:

• Competing risks
• Survival Analysis
• Recidivism
• Corrections

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While is it possible to consider TPRs alone and completely ignore new offenses or incarcerations, this approach is rarely, if ever, employed in criminological studies.

2. It is worth noting that SPB data were transformed in several instances to construct variables that could be used in the present analysis, including collapsing all charges for each offense into a categorical ‘offense type’ variable.

3. Results from these analyses are not presented here but are available upon request.

4. This is essentially the ‘whichever comes first’ approach detailed earlier in this paper. As such, results are simply repeated from Table 2 for this worst-case scenario.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Ostermann

Michael Ostermann is an Associate Professor at the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice, and the Co-Director of the New Jersey Center on Gun Violence Research. Michael’s research interests primarily lie within the fields of corrections and reentry and how they intersect with public policy, as well as the causes and consequences of gun violence. His recent work addresses the recidivistic behavior patterns of former inmates charged with gun offenses, and the impacts of privatization of correctional programs on mechanisms of social control.

Jordan M. Hyatt

Jordan M. Hyatt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Justice Studies at Drexel University. His research focuses on the evaluation of correctional policies, with an emphasis on randomized experiments. His work has recently been published in Law and Social Inquiry, Justice Quarterly and Criminal Justice and Behavior.

Samuel E. DeWitt

Samuel E. DeWitt is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Samuel’s research interests generally involve decision-making, with a particular emphasis on the employment of individuals with criminal histories and the desistance process. His recent work addresses the social network consequences of recent direct and indirect experiences with the criminal justice system and how positive credentials influence the willingness to interview job candidates with criminal records.