Alabama Reentry Task Force to continue defining recidivism

Members of the data working group will continue to define recidivism after receiving feedback from other members of the Reentry Task Force at its meeting Tuesday.

The subcommittee first defined recidivism as people who commit a new crime or return to prison after three years of first getting released from the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections.

“This sounds like a simple task; I assure you it wasn’t because there are several important decisions that go into creating this definition with very real and important implications for how we set our baseline, our targets and track progress toward our Reentry 2030 goals,” said Rebecca Cohen, deputy program director of the research division at The Council of State Governments.

Defining recidivism is important for the committee because it is the metric that Cam Ward, director of the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles, planned to use to improve reentry programs for the state for the next several years.

Reentry 2030 is the initiative that Ward proposed, in collaboration with The Council of State Governments, to improve the chances for people who were incarcerated in Alabama’s prisons to successfully return to their communities. His stated goal for the past several years is to reduce the recidivism rate in Alabama by half and improve the state’s ranking versus others by the end of the decade.

To begin that effort, Alabama must first outline the elements that will factor in the formula to calculate the recidivism rate.

Recidivism includes three components: the release event, the timeline and the qualifying return. There is no standardized criteria to calculate or define the components that get factored into the formula.

“The most common approach, used by 36 states, follows an annual prison release cohort (all individuals released from state prison in a given year) for 3 years after release and defines recidivism as reincarceration in state prison for any reason during that period,” the report by The Council of State Government said.

The working group suggested that the release event for the time window starts when people are released from the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC). The period to measure recidivism is confined to three years and the triggering event to define recidivism is that the person committed a new crime or that the person is returned to ADOC custody.

Alabama’s recidivism rate is about 27% currently.

Committee members highlighted several issues with the definition, such as what could count as a new crime to be included in the definition of recidivism.

“I think the easy way to do it is maybe break it off at an A misdemeanor,” Ward said.

However, Bennet Wright, executive director of the Alabama Sentencing Commission, said it would be hard to determine if misdemeanors even exist in the system.

“The information is not even going to come over,” Wright said.

That information may not even be in the central records within ADOC.

“All that is going to come over is the sentence,” Wright said. “Really, what you are left with at DOC, all it is going to ingest is all felony conviction information. From what DOC has, that is going to be felony information.”

The other problem is uniformity.

“Let’s say someone is out there on probation, and a judge in Montgomery says, ‘You did this technical violation, but I am going to sanction you a little bit but you are going to be alright,’” Ward said. “One county up, ‘We are revoking you and sending you back.’ How do you distinguish between the two for recidivism from a data perspective.”

In the end, Cohen incorporated the feedback and said the working group will continue to refine the definition to find one that best suits the action plan to improve reentry.

“You need to keep it simple so that you can keep policymakers on board to support it,” Ward said. “That being said, reentry is a lot more than reducing recidivism. There are a lot of other factors that play into a successful reentry, but you’ve got to have common sense, practical goals, because not everyone spends their Tuesday afternoon like we do, talking about this.”