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IN THIS ISSUE

Ex-Prisoners and Crime Prevention

Crime may not be the heated campaign issue it was during election cycles in the 1908s and early 1990s. But news headlines last week made it clear that crime prevention has become anything but a small task for federal, state, and local officials.

The Pew Center on the States reported that 1 in 100 adults is in jail or prison. This huge prison population is significant both because it requires resources to maintain and because most prisoners are eventually released to rejoin free society.

The Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center is home to groundbreaking research on prisoners' reentry into the community. Listed below are some of the findings policymakers elected in November will need to consider as they formulate plans to combat crime and prevent recidivism.

KEY FACTS

• In 2005, about 700,000 state and federal prisoners returned to communities in the United States.
• Within three years of release nearly two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested for a new crime and half are reincarcerated.
• Prisoners who find employment after release are less likely to reoffend, and higher wages are associated with lower rates of criminal activity. Even so, less than one third of released prisoners in the United States received vocational training while incarcerated. Limited availability of such programs keeps participation rates low.
• Interviews with ex-prisoners, conducted for an Urban Institute study, indicate that released prisoners who are rearrested are more likely to have used drugs before and after prison.
• On average, a year of supervision and substance-abuse treatment costs $8,000—less than one third of the $25,000 annual incarceration cost.
• Support programs for ex-prisoners are not fail-proof. About one quarter of graduates of even well-implemented programs are likely to return to prison within three years.

Additional analysis is available in UI reports:

• Effective Reentry Programs—Christy Visher
• Understanding the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry—Amy L. Solomon, Christy Visher, Nancy G. La Vigne, Jenny Osborne
• Prisoner Reentry and Community Policing: Strategies for Enhancing Public Safety—Nancy G. La Vigne, Amy L. Solomon, Karen Beckman, Kelly Dedel Johnson
• But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry—Jeremy Travis

Decision Points '08 is published weekly by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan social and economic research organization.
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