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Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs 2004 (2004) 207-255



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The Effect of Prison Releases on Regional Crime Rates

University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Los Angeles
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A direct consequence of the recent increases in the U.S. prison population is the concurrent increase in the number of former inmates and recently released inmates living in noninstitutionalized society. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. prison population increased fourfold from 300,000 to more than 1.2 million. During the same period, the number of exoffenders residing in the community increased from 1.8 to 4.3 million.1 Annually, there are large flows into and out of the state and federal prison systems. For example, in 1999 approximately 550,000 inmates were released from prison, 75 percent being conditionally released into state parole systems. Net of conditional returns to prison, releases in 1999 increased the population of recently released inmates by more than 300,000 people.

The growing numbers of former prison inmates generate a host of problems for receiving communities. Prime among the problems of recent prison releases is the potential effects on local crime rates. By most conventional measures, a large share of exoffenders have postrelease run-ins with the legal system. Approximately 70 percent are rearrested within three years of release, and nearly 50 percent are eventually returned to prison.2 Moreover, roughly 7 percent of those released to [End Page 207] state parole systems abscond from supervision.3 Certainly, these figures suggest a level of criminal activity among former inmates that could impose substantial social costs on receiving communities.

The predominantly urban communities that commit and receive a disproportionate share of state and federal prisoners are most likely to be affected by the criminal activity of released prisoners. Within states prisoner releases are increasingly concentrated in the central cities of metropolitan areas. Lynch and Sabol estimate that the percentage of state prison releases to central cities rose from 50 percent in 1984 to 66 percent in 1996.4 Within central cities, a small number of neighborhoods that are characterized as poor and working class account for a disproportionate share of the concentrations of released prisoners.5 Thus poor urban communities are likely to bear a disproportionate share of the costs of addressing the problems of prisoner release and reintegration. Moreover, given the current fiscal crises faced by many states and pressure to reduce criminal justice expenditures, the challenges to urban areas posed by prison releases are likely to intensify.

Previous research on the link between prison releases and criminal activity focused largely on the determinants of postrelease parole failure, or recidivism broadly defined. In such research the principal measures of recidivism are being returned to the custody of a state or federal prison, being sanctioned in some other form by the parole system (jail time or forced treatment for substance abuse), or absconding.6 Although criminal activity is likely to be correlated with these measures of failure, they are at best noisy measures of the crime committed by former inmates. Variation over time and across states in parole failure rates most likely reflects policy variation rather than the underlying criminality of the parole population. Moreover, the fact that many parolees are returned to prison for technical parole violations (and not new crimes) attenuates the link between actual criminal behavior and common measures of recidivism.

In this paper we assess the impact of recent prison releases on regional crime rates. Using state-level data for the time period 1977 to 1999, we test for a direct correlation between net changes in the population of [End Page 208] recently released prison inmates and changes in violent and property felony crimes. We also present comparable estimates of the effect of new court commitments to prison on state crime rates, interpreting the impact of a new court commitment as that of incarcerating an offender that has never been to prison. We compare the relative impacts of new court commitments and prison releases on crime to gauge...

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