Recidivism after Realignment

I'm a Realignment hobbyist.  I'm not a professional, since I'm not paid by a government agency, think tank, or educational institution.  But, I have attended many of the same conferences as the professionals and poured over many of the same reports.  When AB109 was passed, the landmark legislation popularly known as Realignment, the justification for it's enactment was to reduce recidivism.

Left to policy maker's, and ultimately, the public's imagination, was the issue: What is recidivism and how is it calculated?  Black's Law Dictionary tells us that recidivism is, "a tendency to relapse into a habit of criminal activity or behavior." A lay-person might assume that the recidivism rate includes any offenses committed by a convicted person at any time after their conviction.

But what constitutes an offense?  Is it any offense, jaywalking, for example, that makes an ex-offender a recidivist? Or is it only the commission of a felony?  Does violating parole terms, such as failing to report to a parole officer at an appointed time, or consuming alcohol trigger the recidivist label?  How about the time frame?  Does re-offense within a year constitute recidivism?  How about 5 years?  Or, is it only counted during the time one is on parole?

The State's recidivism calculation is no longer relevant. Parolee's (the new lexicon is PRCS, which stands for post release community supervision), for the most part, are no longer being monitored by the State. Instead, they are monitored by county probation departments. The aggregate data, computed by each of the 58 counties is what matters, now.  How recidivism is defined, and calculated is a significant issue. So far, the counties don't agree on how the rate is calculated.

When the concept of Realignment was introduced to local governments, it was claimed that California's recidivism rate was 70%.  According to the CDCR's latest recidivism report, which was calculated in 2011, released in 2012, and spans the years 2002 through 2009, the return-to-custody rate for prisoners released for 1 year ranged between 45.2% and 49.1%, depending on the year.  For prisoners released for 2 years, the highest rate in the range was 62.5%. And, for prisoners released for 3 years the highest rate in the range was 67.5%.  Intuitively, the longer time period reviewed, the greater the number of incidences of returns-to-custody.

I attended a conference lead by Matt Cate, then Secretary of  CDCR, and Karen Pank, Executive Director of Chief Probation Officers of California. The question was asked, how will we know if Realignment is working? The answer given was when we see the recidivism rate improve.  But without uniform calculations and reconciling the aggregate recidivism rate with former methods of calculation, how can we give true meaning to any of the numbers reported.

Realignment has been in effect for less than 2 years.  Based on the length of time previously needed to calculate recidivism rates and the increased complexity of compiling all of the data from the 58 different counties, it seems likely that any numbers currently quoted represent 12 months of data. Before Realignment, the one year recidivism percentile was in the high 40's.  I'm worried that policy makers will crunch one year's worth of data, find that it's somewhere in the 40 percentile and claim victory.  I'm even more worried that policy makers will hit the reset button every year, and not report the data based on 2 and 3 years stretches.  A recent blog post by California State Association of Counties, Executive Director, Matt Cate (yes, the same Matt Cate) confirms that I have good reason to worry.