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Abstract
Recent scholarship about parole supervision indicates that higher supervision intensity is associated with an increased risk of parole violations. However, parole violations can take many forms—some minor and some serious—and theory suggests that supervision intensity might have differential effects depending upon the type of violation. We use “competing risks” survival models to identify supervision effects on five types of parole violations among 79,082 individuals released from prison in California: absconding, technical violations, drug use, violent offenses, and sexual offenses. We find that supervision effects are strongest for absconding violations. Past sexual offending also triggers significant supervision effects for technical violations, drug use violations, and violent violations. We conclude that parole violation patterns are influenced by parolee behaviors, the amount of attention the state is paying to those behaviors, and official markers of criminal dangerousness that are attached to particular parolees.
Acknowledgments
Additional support was provided by the UCI Center for Evidence-Based Corrections and the Institute for Governmental Affairs at the University of California, Davis. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), and particularly the Division of Adult Parole Operations, the Office of Research, and the Board of Parole Hearings provided access to administrative data. Brad Jones provided early advice on the use of competing risks models. Julie Siebens provided programming to prepare the data for the analyses.
Notes
1 Reincarcerating a parolee with a history of serious criminal behavior also removes that parolee from the officer’s caseload—another professional benefit of (and incentive for) low tolerance.
2 Parole terms in California typically range from three years to life. All study subjects are under observation until they experience a violation event, are discharged from parole, or until December 31st, 2004.
3 Board-ordered revocations can result from non-criminal (technical) violations, and they can also result from new criminal behavior that does not result in a court conviction. When a parolee is accused of a crime, the court (i.e. district attorney) will evaluate the case first. If the district attorney decides not to pursue the case, or if the parolee is found not guilty, the case is then referred to the parole board, which evaluates the case under a more lenient standard of evidence, but can only order a maximum term of reincarceration of 12 months. See Lin et al. (Citation2012) for more detail.
4 This contrasts with Grattet et al. (Citation2011) who focus on all parolees on parole in California during 2003–2004. They also explicitly allow for repeated events (i.e. multiple instances of violation). Thus, our data represent a subset of their data, restricting attention to first releases onto parole and to first violations. We did so in order to appropriately apply the competing risks approach, as well as for reasons cited in the text above. The reader should also keep in mind that “first release to parole” refers to the first parole release for the current commitment offense. Parolees may have been imprisoned earlier in their lives and completed the parole terms associated with those earlier imprisonments. If these offenders are included in our sample, they have been rearrested and imprisoned for a new offense, and their “first release to parole” actually indicates first release for the current offense.
5 Recent research on juvenile sex offenders suggest that registration, which increases the surveillance directed at the juvenile, shows that the offenders had higher levels of reported “other” offenses (non-sexual) and a slight increase in sexual offenses, but no increase in the risk of conviction for sexual offenses (Letourneau et al., Citation2009).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ryken Grattet
Ryken Grattet is a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, and research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. He writes about punishment and criminal law, focusing on the development and enforcement of hate crime law and the California prison and parole system.
Jeffrey Lin
Jeffrey Lin is an assistant professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Denver. His research focuses on decision-making in criminal justice institutions, with specific attention to the treatment of juveniles, parolees, and sex offenders.