Custodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review

Previous articleNext article FreeCustodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic ReviewDamon M. Petrich, Travis C. Pratt, Cheryl Lero Jonson, and Francis T. CullenDamon M. Petrich, Travis C. Pratt, Cheryl Lero Jonson, and Francis T. CullenAbstractFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAbstractBeginning in the 1970s, the United States began an experiment in mass imprisonment. Supporters argued that harsh punishments such as imprisonment reduce crime by deterring inmates from reoffending. Skeptics argued that imprisonment may have a criminogenic effect. The skeptics were right. Previous narrative reviews and meta-analyses concluded that the overall effect of imprisonment is null. Based on a much larger meta-analysis of 116 studies, the current analysis shows that custodial sanctions have no effect on reoffending or slightly increase it when compared with the effects of noncustodial sanctions such as probation. This finding is robust regardless of variations in methodological rigor, types of sanctions examined, and sociodemographic characteristics of samples. All sophisticated assessments of the research have independently reached the same conclusion. The null effect of custodial compared with noncustodial sanctions is considered a “criminological fact.” Incarceration cannot be justified on the grounds it affords public safety by decreasing recidivism. Prisons are unlikely to reduce reoffending unless they can be transformed into people-changing institutions on the basis of available evidence on what works organizationally to reform offenders.After a nearly 600 percent increase in the rate of imprisonment in the United States between 1972 and 2007 (Pager 2007; Nellis and King 2009), this trend is slowly beginning to reverse, with rates declining by an average of 1.2 percent per year between 2008 and 2018 (Maruschak and Minton 2020). Still, the latest nationwide data compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Maruschak and Minton 2020) show that 2,123,100 Americans were held in federal or state prisons and local jails as of December 2018. Even with declines over the past decade, the United States maintains its dubious title as the world leader in imprisonment with approximately 655 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, followed by El Salvador (604) and Turkmenistan (526). The imprisonment rates of other culturally comparable countries, such as Canada (114), the United Kingdom (140), and Australia (172), are but a fraction of America’s (World Prison Brief 2018). Taken together, government agencies in the United States spend approximately $80 billion per year on corrections (National Academy of Sciences 2014), with average incarceration costs of around $30,000 per inmate per year (PEW Center on the States 2009; Vera Institute 2017).Scholars have produced myriad works over the past three decades that attempt to account for the meteoric growth of incarceration in the United States (see, e.g., Garland 2001; Zimring 2001; Tonry 2004, 2007, 2009; Gottschalk 2006; Clear and Frost 2014; Enns 2016; Pfaff 2017, 2020; Muhammad 2019). Within these works, a diverse range of factors have been proposed as holding explanatory value: increased rates of crime beginning in the 1960s; beliefs that rehabilitation programs for offenders do not work; the resurgence of conservative ideals such as individual responsibility, commonsense law and order, and absolutist conceptions of right and wrong; racial resentment and the use of crime policy to protect against minority encroachment on White social and economic advantage; mass media sensationalism of rare yet high-profile correctional system failures; increases in fear of crime and expansions of victims’ advocacy groups; the existence of conflictual, two-party political systems; and democratic rather than meritocratic selection of prosecutors and judges. Any one of these factors is unlikely to be a sufficient explanation, some factors hold more merit than others, and many factors may have interacted to nourish the nation’s protracted experiment in mass incarceration (Tonry 2004; Pfaff 2020).Regardless of the motivating rationales and causes, a host of legal and policy changes between the mid-1970s and 1990s made sentences to imprisonment much more likely and longer. From the mid-1970s onward, states such as California, Illinois, Indiana, and Maine introduced determinate sentencing reforms that severely limited or completely abolished the use of parole. Laws focused on creating mandatory minimum sentences also proliferated the country between the 1970s and 1990s. For example, Michigan enacted the “650 Lifer Law” in 1978, which originally mandated life without parole if convicted of trafficking more than 650 grams of cocaine or heroin. Likewise, the 1984 federal Comprehensive Crime Control Act required a five-year sentence enhancement for carrying a firearm during the commission of another drug or violent offense. In the 1990s, more than half of the states passed some form of a three strikes or habitual offender law in attempts to target repeat offenders. In California, for instance, these laws required a life sentence for individuals convicted of a felony who had been convicted of two or more felonies in the past. At the federal level, too, legislation such as the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act provided states with additional funding for the construction of prisons, conditional on evidence that the state was sentencing more violent offenders to prison and for longer (Zimring, Hawkins, and Kamin 2001; Spohn 2008; Tonry 1996, 2009; National Academy of Sciences 2014; Pfaff 2017).It is often overlooked that the escalation of punitive policies was detached from any empirical base of knowledge regarding the effects of imprisonment on crime. Rather, these measures were largely based on “blind faith that a silver-bullet solution [could] magically solve the [crime] problem” (Mears and Cochran 2015, p. 58). Some theoretical discussion and research attempted to assess the notion that crime could be reduced by incapacitating active offenders via imprisonment (Shinnar and Shinnar 1975; Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin 1978; Spelman 1994, 2000). However, little empirical work was done to assess the effects of custodial sanctions on postrelease reoffending (Mears and Cochran 2015). Based on our survey of this literature, only 13 studies comparing the outcomes of those sentenced to custodial and noncustodial sanctions were conducted prior to 1990, another 23 in the subsequent decade, and another 25 through to 2008. Many of these early studies were of conspicuously poor methodological quality, often relying on bivariate assessments or on regression and exact matching models that adjusted for only a handful of relevant confounders (Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson 2009; Villettaz, Gillieron, and Killias 2015). In short, during the times when the mass incarceration movement began and grew most rapidly, relatively little was known about the effect being imprisoned had on reoffending.Lacking an empirical foundation for their experiment with large-scale imprisonment, politicians justified their efforts with the “common sense” notion that people are rational actors and could therefore be deterred from crime if punishments were severe enough (Garland 2001; Clear and Frost 2014). As imprisonment is commonly viewed as the ultimate loss of freedoms, social connection, and the like, increasing the likelihood of being sent to prison and the length of prison terms was viewed as a uniquely effective way to deter offending. This view had some support among economists, political scientists, and other scholars (Becker 1968; Wilson 1975; van den Haag 1977), though their support was generally based on theory rather than empirical evidence. An alternative perspective, advanced by the majority of sociologists and criminologists, was that imprisonment is more likely to have criminogenic effects than to serve as an effective deterrent to prisoners (e.g., Shaw 1930; Sutherland 1939; Sykes 1958; de Tocqueville [1844] 1968; Braithwaite 1989). These scholars suggested that a variety of factors associated with a custodial sentence increase reoffending, including close-quarters cohabitation with and learning from other inmates, the strains of exposure to violence and loss of personal freedoms, the fraying of ties to support networks, and the collateral consequences attached to a criminal conviction such as barriers to employment and housing. Until fairly recently, however, direct evidence showing the criminogenic effect of these conditions has remained limited (see, e.g., Sampson and Laub 1993; Bayer, Hjalmarsson, and Pozen 2009; Listwan et al. 2013).To have embarked on a decades-long experiment in mass incarceration with scant empirical knowledge of the effect of prison on postrelease offending seems inexplicable in retrospect. On any given day, more than two million people are held in correctional institutions in the United States (Maruschak and Minton 2020). Ninety-five percent of inmates are eventually released, which means that approximately 600,000 individuals leave prisons each year and another 10.7 million cycle through local jails (Carson 2020; Zeng 2020). With so many lives at stake—including both prisoners and potential victims—correctional policy should be informed by research. That is why a comprehensive review of the research on custodial sanctions and reoffending is necessary. We provide that review. Prior narrative and meta-analytic reviews have indicated that, compared with noncustodial sanctions such as probation, sentencing individuals to terms of imprisonment generally has a null or criminogenic effect on reoffending (Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson 2009; Jonson 2010; Villettaz, Gillieron, and Killias 2015). However, these reviews are limited by factors such as small numbers of primary studies to draw from, few studies of strong methodological rigor, modeling strategies that could not account for multiple effect sizes nested within individual studies, and limited or nonexistent analyses of factors that might moderate the effects of custodial sanctions on reoffending.The meta-analytic review presented in this essay overcomes these problems and builds on earlier work in four important ways. First, it includes 55 additional studies produced since the last comprehensive reviews were made by Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson (2009) and Jonson (2010). Taken together, these more recent studies include 691 effect size estimates, many from models that capitalize on natural experiments or use propensity score methods. Second, we expanded our inclusion criteria beyond those of Villettaz, Gillieron, and Killias (2015) to include all studies comparing custodial and noncustodial sanctions, including those using bivariate and multivariate regression analyses. Third, we capitalize on advances in meta-analytic techniques to use a multilevel modeling approach (Hox, Moerbeek, and van der Schoot 2018). These methods allow individual effect sizes to be weighted by their precision rather than sample size and allow for the inclusion of multiple effect sizes from within individual studies while accounting for their statistical dependence. Fourth, given the large number of available effect size estimates (N = 981) and a detailed coding scheme, we were able to assess the influence of a broad range of potential moderators, including the overall research design, covariates accounted for in statistical models, types and lengths of sanctions examined, and sociodemographic characteristics of samples such as the age and gender distributions. Following Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson (2009, p. 120), we “use the concept of reoffending to refer to all criminal acts committed by a person following a legal sanction”—in this case, a custodial or noncustodial placement. As Section IV shows, custodial sanctions have a null or criminogenic effect on reoffending when compared with noncustodial sanctions such as probation. Although a small number of factors moderate effect size estimates (e.g., research design, type of reoffending measure), we find no conditions under which custody reduces reoffending.This subject is particularly timely given there are signs that America’s fixation on imprisonment is beginning to wane (Petersilia and Cullen 2015; Tonry 2019; Butler et al. 2020). Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that prison and jail incarceration rates have declined by 15 percent and 11 percent, respectively, since 2008 (Carson 2020; Zeng 2020). There is also now bipartisan support for efforts to reform the criminal justice system. At the federal level, for example, the Second Chance Act and the First Step Act were collaborative efforts by Democrats and Republicans and signed into law by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump (Lattimore and Visher 2009; Cohen 2019). These acts have provided funding to create and evaluate programs aimed to facilitate offenders’ reentry into their communities (e.g., education and employment assistance, cognitive-behavioral treatment), develop risk assessment tools, investigate sentencing reforms, and develop partnerships with community organizations (for a review of the effectiveness of these efforts, see Petrich et al. 2021). Efforts to reduce prison populations are also occurring at the state level, with previously high-incarceration states such as Louisiana and Mississippi exploring justice reinvestment policies and changes to sentencing guidelines (Gray 2011; Cohen 2017; PEW Charitable Trusts 2018). Finally, there is an increasing amount of public support for and political and media discourse about issues such as ban-the-box, problem-solving courts, felon disenfranchisement, criminal record expungement, and rehabilitation ceremonies (e.g., Love and Schlussel 2019; Thielo et al. 2019; Butler et al. 2020).Two other considerations are germane. First, more attention is being paid to the racial disparities that pervade the American criminal justice system, owing in large part to public outrage over recent tragic events such as the killings of Eric Garner, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. Because of the role of law enforcement in these high-profile killings, much ensuing policy discussion has centered around proposals to defund the police in one way or another, whether through complete abolishment or redirecting funds toward social work, mental health, and substance abuse treatment (Lowrey 2020; North 2020; Searcey 2020). But it is important also to consider that disparities exist beyond police-citizen interaction (Ba et al. 2021). Influential books such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, documentary films such as 13th (DuVernay 2016), and myriad empirical analyses show that disparities in the correctional system are often large and have long-term negative consequences for Black communities (Clear 2007; Kirk 2016). Studies have consistently shown that Black citizens, particularly young males, are more likely than Whites to be placed in pretrial detention, receive sentences of incarceration, and receive longer sentences (e.g., Bales and Piquero 2012b; Wooldredge et al. 2015; Holmes, Feldmeyer, and Kulig 2020; see also King and Light 2019). In light of these disparities, it is important to think about how the mass application of a sanction that does little to reduce reoffending will negatively affect citizens and their communities. Outcomes commonly cited in the literature include the dissolution of families, depression of local economies, and greater cynicism toward the criminal justice system (Clear 2007; Western and Wildeman 2009; Kirk 2016). If sentences such as probation produce reoffending outcomes comparable to those of imprisonment and simultaneously alleviate collateral consequences, the current public policy debates about criminal justice reform should take this into account.Also germane are the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on prisoners, their release, and crime; 37.7 million people in the United States had contracted COVID-19 as of August 23, 2021, of whom 628,285 died (“Coronavirus in the U.S.” 2021). Given the close-quarters nature of the prison environment, it is not surprising—though disturbing—that 661,000 inmates and employees in America’s jails and prisons have been infected and another 2,990 have died (“Coronavirus in the U.S.” 2021). These are much greater rates of infection than in the population-at-large. For example, a report by Schwartzapfel, Park, and Demillo in December 2020 showed that the rate of infection among US prisoners was four times greater than among the general population. In some states, for example Kansas, infection rates among prisoners were as much as eight times larger. In response to these troubling numbers, many state and local legislators have taken actions that led to the release of small numbers of inmates who were close to their scheduled discharge dates (Porter 2021; Prison Policy Initiative 2021). However, although prison and jail populations dropped by 9 percent and 24 percent, respectively, between 2019 and 2020 (Kang-Brown, Montagnet, and Heiss 2021), most of these changes appear to be the result of reduced admissions rather than increased releases (Widra and Wagner 2020). The reoffending outcomes of those released from incarceration remain to be seen. Our own review of the literature on custodial sanctions shows that those sentenced to custody are equally as likely to reoffend as those who remain on community supervision. This raises concerns about the small number of releases in the midst of battling a virus that spreads rapidly in confined, close-quarters spaces (Vose, Cullen, and Lee 2020).Against the backdrop of declines in prison populations over the past decade, growing support for exploring alternatives to incarceration, concerns over racial disparities, and the close-quarters confinement of large numbers of inmates during a pandemic, there is need for a comprehensive empirical understanding of the role of incarceration in reducing reoffending and promoting public safety. Here is how this essay, which addresses that need, is organized. Section I examines two competing perspectives on the effects of incarceration. The deterrence perspective that via imprisonment changes the of offenders and their to The criminogenic perspective that offenders are to a range of during and imprisonment that reoffending more Section the current state of research these including for in and the of prior literature Section the methods to our including strategies to the literature for studies comparing the effects of custodial and noncustodial sanctions, how effect sizes and methodological variations were and statistical methods to the Section IV the of the meta-analytic review. with noncustodial sanctions, custodial sanctions have a null to slightly criminogenic effect on reoffending. The of this overall effect is shown through analyses that assess whether effect sizes by and other characteristics of the studies Based on our and prior Section that the null effects of custodial sanction on reoffending should be considered a “criminological fact.” We by exploring the of this finding for correctional policy in the United on this we the competing individual deterrence and perspectives on the effects of imprisonment on subsequent and “common sense” that the of imprisonment should reduce subsequent offending have been by the Incarceration as a notion that offenders are individuals who can be deterred from offending by increasing the of punishments support among politicians and citizens between the 1970s and 1990s, particularly in the United States (Garland 2001; Clear and Frost 2014; 2019). The theoretical is that individuals in crime it their and 2001; and with an to in criminal the offender can to the crime and receive its or not the crime and receive no the to a crime is both and while the criminal both a and a risk of potential the to a analysis of the of the potential of the against a of the of and the of the (Becker Following this the of incarceration some of deterrence to the at large general and the of incarceration for individual offenders is that the of criminal is by its costs to the that by incarceration are as more severe than those of a noncustodial incarceration should a greater deterrent effect than sanctions such as probation (Nagin, Cullen, and Jonson the of the notion that punishments will deter criminal there are and empirical to be are most First, rates of reoffending for those sentenced to incarceration are and and and 2018). In an important and showed that percent of prisoners are within three of recent data report a percent rate of prisoners three and an percent rate within and 2018). of deterrence the rate of imprisonment in reoffending among released of deterrence that both and of are required for any sanction to deter to this the deterrent effect of a sanction that is severe yet unlikely to is limited and This is the for incarceration as a of an individual is sentenced to the crime be the the offender the by the or and the sentence be a of incarceration. As and Nagin of these in through the criminal justice system is another the majority of criminal events do not result in imprisonment and and the deterrent effect of This on the of a severe yet unlikely of imprisonment is reviews of the literature strategies focused on increasing the of are much more effective (e.g., such as see and Nagin 2011; and 2017; and about the of noncustodial alternatives such as probation or treatment could be the data are that probation is a more likely of a conviction than incarceration (National Academy of Sciences 2014). be rates of reoffending for offenders sentenced to probation are also with between and percent within three (Petersilia 2019). However, the of offenders sentenced to prison probation are likely to be in terms of criminal and other of the of custodial sanctions in reducing reoffending need to take account of factors that influence selection into the of a custodial the deterrent of custodial sanctions that offenders such sanctions as being more severe than noncustodial however, research this is not the Many offenders rather serve prison terms (e.g., than punishments with conditions (Petersilia 1993; and individual among offenders and of sentences appear to influence the of incarceration. by et al. and and that inmates with a greater of to a criminal (e.g., crime is much a way of prison as being than those with of et al. also find that the of incarceration over the of incarceration. The of custody might its for inmates committed to or who over to prison Incarceration as a deterrence reduce incarceration to a that about costs and other in prison as a social that can have criminogenic Cullen, Jonson, and Nagin p. for example, that inmates with other the of imprisonment, risk are from and on the and although prisons are to deter this perspective that incarceration individuals to criminogenic risk factors and from increasing the of reoffending as offenders in a of the prison has been to as a of or of of the likelihood that techniques of and for crime are between The of social learning when to the prison 1939; 2009), that as inmates are to a large of and from any on the they into with (e.g., the see and et al. from and in to to prison life and offending in and receive social and for to prison studies an important role for effects in postrelease offending (e.g., Bayer, Hjalmarsson, and Pozen 2009; 2011; and 2016). In their of effects among and (2009) find that an exposure to a greater of inmates with the same conviction increases reoffending within that crime for an individual committed for increases in the of inmates convicted of were associated with of the inmate another work and shows that effects are more for (e.g., than for violent 2011; and 2016; and inmates are often to the types of events to increase and criminal general theory that to of and of negative often to criminal they negative states (e.g., and to with those The personal and social of the such as and social moderate the between the negative and the or and 2019). and that these are relevant to within prison For example, that may be during incarceration include to work or that are include a of personal and among 1958; and prison increased

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