2018 Sentencing Commission Recidivism Report Available

The North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission recently released its biennial Correctional Program Evaluation—known better as the Recidivism Report. The report, prepared in conjunction with the Division of Adult Correction and Juvenile Justice, is available here. It covers defendants placed on probation or released from prison in Fiscal Year 2015. As always, the report defines recidivism as an arrest, conviction, or subsequent incarceration during a two-year period after being placed on probation or released from imprisonment. The report covers 32,537 probation entries and 15,077 prison exits, picking the data apart in many interesting ways. Readers of this blog will definitely want to take a look at the full report. Here are a few my own observations. Probationers holding steady. North Carolina’s overall recidivism rates for probationers remained largely unchanged. That’s an unremarkable statement, I suppose—except when you consider how much North Carolina law has changed since 2011. This year’s report follows a cohort of offenders who served their sentences under the new rules implemented by the Justice Reinvestment Act: revocation only for new crimes and absconding. It’s hard to control for all variables, but we can at least say that Justice Reinvestment allowed for a substantial reduction in North Carolina’s correctional population without causing a major spike in recidivist behavior by probationers. Not so for low-level felony prisoners. The recidivist incarceration rate for prison inmates increased from 21 percent in FY 2013 to 32 percent in FY 2015. That increase is obviously driven by the fact that many more inmates [...]