Funding: Smith Richardson Foundation
Summary: With more than 600,000 prisoners returning to society each year, the issue of prisoner reentry is at the forefront of domestic public policy. How many of these prisoners will reoffend, and which factors influence the likelihood of recidivating? Prior studies have focused exclusively on individual-level characteristics of offenders and their offenses to determine the correlates of reoffending. Notably absent from recidivism studies are measures reflecting the neighborhood contexts in which the individuals live. Few studies document the types of neighborhoods prisoners are released into or whether ex-offenders tend to disproportionately live in socially disorganized neighborhoods with high rates of poverty, joblessness, and residential mobility—factors that can facilitate recidivism. Neighborhood context is fundamental to our understanding of why people reoffend yet we know little about how ecological characteristics of communities influence the reoffending behavior of prisoners. Using data on a sample of released offenders in Washington, D.C., this study will examine both individual and neighborhood level correlates of recidivism. The questions that motivate this research are: 1) To what extent do neighborhood characteristics account for variation in the reoffending behavior of prisoners that is not explained by their individual-level characteristics?, 2) How do individual-level and neighborhood- level characteristics interact to influence rates of recidivism?, and 3) Does neighborhood context help explain why minorities are more likely to reoffend than whites once released.