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Dayton
Daily News...
Ohio’s decline in
prison recidivism among steepest in U.S., study says
By Tom Beyerlein
Thursday, April 14, 2011
The national criminal recidivism rate “remains stubbornly high” despite
huge increases in state spending on prisons over the past two decades,
according to a study issued Wednesday by the Pew Center on the States.
The study singled out Ohio as having one of the steepest declines among
the states studied in the number of convicts who returned to prison for
parole violations.
More than four in 10 convicts in the United States return to prison
within three years, either because they violated their parole or
committed new felonies, Pew reported in what it called the “first-ever
state-by-state survey of recidivism rates.”
In collaboration with the Association of State Correctional
Administrators, Pew followed inmates released in 1999 and in 2004 and
found that 45.4 percent and 43.3 percent, respectively, returned to
prison within three years. Federal statistics for decades have pegged
the recidivism rate at about 40 percent.
Ohio’s three-year recidivism rate for inmates released in 2007, the
most recent statistics available, is 34 percent, the lowest in 11
years. That’s down from 39.6 percent among inmates released in 2004.
“There’s been an enormous escalation in prison spending but a barely
noticeable impact on the national recidivism rate,” said Pew’s Adam
Gelb. “These troubling figures should accelerate the trend toward
policies that will give taxpayers a better public safety return on
their massive expenditure on incarceration.”
Reducing recidivism also reduces government spending: Pew said state
corrections spending has quadrupled over the past two decades to more
than $50 billion a year, and corrections is second only to Medicaid as
the fastest-growing state budget category. If the 41 states reporting
data cut their recidivism by 10 percent, Pew said, they’d be able to
cut corrections spending by a combined $635 million in one year.
Gov. John Kasich’s fiscal 2012 executive budget recommendations call
for cutting total corrections spending from an estimated $1.75 billion
in fiscal 2011 to $1.57 billion, a reduction of 9.9 percent. Operating
expenses for Ohio prisons have leaped from $427 million in fiscal 1991
to $1.2 billion in fiscal 2001 to nearly $1.5 billion in fiscal 2011.
The Pew study noted that the percentage of Ohio convicts who returned
on parole violations fell from 12 percent to 7 percent between the two
periods. That 7 percent held steady for inmates released in 2007, while
fewer convicts returned on new felonies.
“These numbers are good. It didn’t just happen — it’s because there’s
been a concerted effort in Ohio to bring these numbers down,” said
Montgomery County Commissioner Deborah Lieberman, who is active in
local efforts to smooth ex-convicts’ re-entry into the community.
“These efforts are starting to pay off.”
Ohio prisons remain crowded, with nearly 51,000 inmates in 31 prisons
designed for 38,389. Almost half of new inmates have sentences of a
year or less.
Pew said the states that are most successful in lowering recidivism are
those using what it calls evidence-based strategies that are cheaper
than prison and work better in helping ex-convicts remain law-abiding.
Ed Rhine, deputy director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and
Correction, said Ohio is using such strategies, including better
methods for screening inmates for rehabilitative programming and
assessing parolees’ levels of risk and the seriousness of violations
when deciding whether to revoke parole. Those ex-convicts who pose
little risk to the public and have committed minor parole violations
are now more likely to remain in the community, where they can hold
down jobs and have more access to rehabilitation programs, he said.
Rhine said the state started using progressive sanctions for parole
violators around 2006 to “keep a larger number of offenders in the
community without endangering the public. We don’t want to prematurely
pull the revocation trigger. Years ago, we might have been quicker to
return them to prison.”
The study found that recidivism rates differ considerably between
states for various reasons, including the types of inmates sentenced to
prison, how inmates are chosen for release, the length of parole and
decisions about the consequences of violating the rules of supervision.
The numbers of ex-convicts returning to prison for a new crime ranged
from 44.7 percent in Alaska to 4.7 percent in Montana, while the number
returning for parole violations ran from 40.3 percent in Missouri to
zero in Arkansas, which sends parole violators to nonprison programs.
The Pew study had limitations: 41 states provided data for 2004, and 33
provided data for prisoners released in 1999.
Of the 33 states reporting data for both 1999 and 2004, recidivism
dropped in 17, rose in 15 and stayed the same in one.
Rhine said no one is satisfied with Ohio’s current numbers.
“Thirty-four percent is still too high,” he said, “but it’s a welcome
drop.”
Read it at the Dayton Daily News
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