Source: papers.ssrn.com 6/14/24
Abstract
At year-end 2021, there were nearly four million individuals serving a term of probation, parole, or post-release supervision in the United States. This paper uses a unique and detailed dataset to study two distinct changes to state law that eliminated and then reinstated post-release supervision for a subset of the population released from Kansas prisons.
Each of these changes occurred in very different periods of criminal justice policy (2000 and 2013 respectively), but yielded the same result: post-release supervision caused large increases in reimprisonment with no detectable impact on reoffending.
Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that the elimination of post-release supervision in 2000 decreased the one-year reimprisonment rate of affected individuals by 28.5 percentage points from a baseline of 35 percent (about an 80 percent decrease).
In 2013, the reinstatement of post-release supervision caused a 17.5 percentage point increase in reimprisonment (bringing the reimprisonment rate back to approximately 30 percent) with no detectable decrease in reoffending. Furthermore, I find that the elimination of post-release supervision in 2000 completely closed the racial gap in reimprisonment rates among the impacted individuals.
These results provide support for policies that would reduce the use of community supervision, not only to lower reincarceration rates, but as a promising opportunity to eliminate a major source of racial inequality in the criminal legal system.