Principal investigator: Eduarda Miller de Figueiredo
Author Evan K. Rose
Location of the Intervention: Carolina do Norte
Sample Size: 1.603.713 individuals
Sector: Public security
Primary Variable of Interest: Violation of Parole
Type of Intervention: Parole
Methodology: 2SLS, Differences in Differences
Summary
This article studies the primary way in which the U.S. Criminal Justice System gives convicted offenders a second chance to avoid prison and return to work: parole. Using a 2011 reform in North Carolina, it was studied whether parole violations are punished severely enough to deter recidivism. Through robust estimations, it was found that the reform reduced racial differences in parole revocations due to rule violations, but did not reduce racial disparities in prisons.
- Policy Problem
Recent research has studied racial disparities in decisions made by police, judges, prosecutors, and juries, and how arrest, conviction, and incarceration affect economic outcomes (Chetty et al., 2020). However, less attention has been paid to the impact of supervision, which is the most common form of punishment in the United States.
Every year, more than 4,4 million convicted offenders are sent home under supervision on the condition that they obey strict rules, such as prohibitions on alcohol and drugs, frequent meetings with a social worker, and payment of fines and fees. Failure to comply with these rules can result in incarceration. According to the State Government Council Justice Center (2019)[1]However, supervised offenders are just as likely to be incarcerated for such "technical violations" as for new national criminal offenses, which are more concentrated among Black men.
These technical rules, however, are the main tools that the system uses to monitor supervised offenders and support their reintegration (Piehl and LoBuglio, 2005). Despite the costs, punishing technical rule violations with incarceration – or revoking supervision – can be effective if the violations are strong indicators of future criminal behavior, making them good indicators of recidivism risk.
Thus, this article examines the effectiveness and fairness of revocation under a probationary regime, which accounts for 80% of the supervised population.
- Implementation and Evaluation Context
In recent decades, the supervised population has grown in parallel with incarceration rates. Compared to 1980 levels, there has been an increase of over 300%, and the number of incarcerated individuals has more than doubled. For much of the past 25 years, the state of North Carolina operated a very small probation system, opting to release the majority of incarcerated individuals without supervision. However, this study's analysis focuses only on the supervised probation system.
Parole in the United States is most commonly used for young offenders and first-time criminals facing their first criminal trial. In North Carolina, 78% of first-time offenders are placed on parole, along with 70% of offenders aged 16 to 25. Parole periods typically last between 1 and 3 years, with failure to comply risking incarceration. North Carolina includes a set of standard rules regarding parole conditions:
- Payment of court-ordered fees and fines (general court costs of approximately US$150 and a monthly supervision fee of US$30–US$50).
- Staying within the jurisdiction of the court.
- Report regularly to a probation officer.
- Submitting to drug and alcohol tests and searches without a warrant.
- Trying to remain employed with pay.
- Special conditions may be imposed, such as substance abuse treatment programs and electronic monitoring.
Furthermore, racial disparities are a widespread feature of the U.S. Criminal Justice System, where Black men who have not completed high school are almost as likely to be incarcerated as they are to work, and are employed half as often as white men with similar education.
In 2011, North Carolina made changes to the State Criminal Justice System by passing the Justice Reinvestment Act (JRA). This introduced strong limits on the authority of courts to revoke probation; thus, after 2011, supervision could only be revoked due to the occurrence of new crimes or escape from supervision. Previously, judges could revoke probation for any technical violation.
- Policy/Program Details
Administrative datasets provided by the North Carolina Department of Public Safety (DPS) were analyzed.[2] and from all criminal courts of cases resolved from 2006 to the present. The core data consists of records of individuals serving supervised probation between 2006 and 2018.
The control and treatment groups are young, with 50% of the sample being 30 years old or younger at the start of the period, mostly male, and minorities overrepresented relative to the state's population. On average, supervised probation periods last about 20 months and result from a relatively balanced mix of crime, misdemeanor, and driving (drunk driving or revoked license).
The sample studied has very limited criminal records, with the median defendant having only one prior conviction for a misdemeanor and no prior sentences for supervised probation or incarceration. Most probation violations were for failure to pay fees and fines. The other most common violations are: failure to report to a probation officer, drug violations, and failures in the drug treatment program.
- Assessment Method
In the analysis, a binary dependent variable was used, where it will take the value 1 if an offender is arrested for a new crime. To investigate racial differences, three measures of revocation effectiveness were used. The first is predictive accuracy, where when it is high, a large fraction of those revoked will reoffend, while when it is close to the population average, revocation would have no signal value for recidivism. The second and third concepts provide alternative measures of effectiveness by reversing this conditional probability to examine type I and type II error rates.
Accuracy and error rates were estimated using instrumental variables, allowing for estimation via the 2SLS model. Furthermore, a difference-in-differences approach was also used to compare outcomes between supervised and unsupervised offenders.
- Main results
The main findings demonstrate that the number of offenders on supervised and unsupervised probation did not change subtly around the time of the reform, indicating that the sentencing behavior of judges was not affected. Thus, although probation in general became more lenient after the reform, there is no evidence that judges changed their sentencing behavior or that potential offenders changed their crime choices in response.
The results from the difference-in-differences analysis show that the 2011 JRA reform had virtually no effect on the group of unsupervised offenders. There was a decrease in revocations of approximately 6 percentage points. Because offenders did not see a decline in probation revocations, their incarceration rates remained relatively stable throughout the reform.
Regarding racial disparities, the results demonstrate that Black offenders continue to see substantially greater reductions in incarceration, but without significant changes in recidivism. The evidence suggests that racial disparities in this scenario do not arise due to racial bias on the part of police, judges, or probation officers, but rather reflect behavioral differences between Black and non-Black offenders. However, such differences are not easily explained by observable characteristics, suggesting that the behavioral differences between these two groups that generate the differentiated impact of revocations may be a reflection of other more subtle and contextual factors, such as access to informal credit that could be used to pay fees and fines.
- Lessons in Public Policy
The results show that ostensibly race-neutral policies (imposing common-sense rules) can generate large racial disparities not justified by the ultimate objectives of the policies. Correcting disparities due to disparate impacts may be easier than changing the biased behavior of decision-makers, because that is a matter of simply changing the rules themselves. Thus, the findings presented by the study provide evidence that such policies are viable and can have significant impacts on racial disparities.
References
Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya Porter, “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135 (2020), 711–783.
Council of State Governments Justice Center, “Confined and Costly: Hou Supervision Violations Are Filling Prisons and Burdening Budgets,” CSG Technical Report, 2019.
Piehl, Anne Morrison, and Stefan F. LoBuglio, “Does Supervision Matter,” Ch. 5 105-138, in Prisoner Reentry and Crime in America, Jeremy Travis and Christy Visher, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
[1] Council of State Governments Justice Center.
[2] North Carolina Department of Public Safety (DPS).
