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Duration of the Time to Reconviction: Evidence From UK Prisoner Discharge Data

NCJ Number
219876
Journal
Journal of Criminal Justice Volume: 35 Issue: 4 Dated: July/August 2007 Pages: 365-378
Author(s)
Roger Arthur Bowles; Chrisostomos Florackis
Date Published
July 2007
Length
14 pages
Annotation
This study used duration models in order to examine reconviction risks for a sample of 34,126 offenders released from prison in England and Wales during 1998.
Abstract
Results show that the reconviction rates for the total sample, the sample of males, and the sample of females over the period of 2 years from release were 57.56, 58.02, and 54.42 percent respectively. The majority reoffended within the first 12 months after their release. The study found that a 1-year increase in age decreased the risk of reconviction within 2 years by almost 5 percent. On average, there was evidence that male offenders had a higher risk for reconviction than female offenders, also the greater the number of previous convictions, the higher the risk of reconviction. The risk of reconviction was relatively low for offenses of violence, sex, fraud-forgery, and drugs. Offenders previously convicted for burglary and theft had a higher risk for reconviction. White offenders had a higher risk of reconviction than offenders of other races, and offenders whose initial sentence was imprisonment had a lower risk of reconviction than other offenders. The study advises that the structure of resettlement support to released prisoners can be more effective by using risk estimates to infer peak reconviction risk intervals for offenders with various characteristics. The prisoners in the study involved all who were released from prison during calendar year 1998, excluding those for whom the full battery of data were not available. Different versions of the Cox proportional hazards model were applied to the dataset that covered several offense types. 5 tables, 7 figures, 17 notes, and 48 references