Research in Criminology Series Editors Alfred Blumstein David P. Farrington Research in Criminology Understanding and Controlling Crime: Toward A New Research Strategy David P. Farrington, Lloyd E. Ohlin and James Q. Wilson The Social Ecology of Crime J .M. Byrne and R.J. Sampson (Eds.) The Reasoning Criminal: Rational Choice Perspectives on Offending Derek B. Cornish and Ronald V. Clarke (Eds.) The Social Contexts of Criminal Sentencing Martha A. Myers and Susette M. Talarico Predicting Recidivism Using Survival Models Peter Schmidt and Ann Dryden Witte Coping, Behavior, and Adaptation in Prison Inmates Edward Zamble and Frank J. Porporino Prison Crowding: A Psychological Perspective Paul B. Paulus Off School, In Court: An Experimental and Psychiatric Investigation of Severe School Attendance Problems I. Berg, I. Brown and R. Hullin Policing and Punishing the Drinking Driver: A Study of General and Specific Deterrence Ross Homel Judicial Decision Making, Sentencing Policy, and Numerical Guidance Austin Lovegrove Criminal Behavior and the Justice System: Psychological Perspectives Hermann Wegener, Friedrich Losel and Jochen Haisch (Eds.) Male Criminal Activity from Childhood Through Youth: Multilevel and Developmental Perspectives Marc Le Blanc and Marcel Frechette continued on page 142 s. Ekland-Olson W.R. Kelly Justice Under Pressure A Comparison of Recidivism Patterns Among Four Successive Parolee Cohorts With 29 Illustrations With H. -J. Joo, J. Olbrich, and M. Eisenberg Springer-Verlag New York Berlin Heidelberg London Paris Tokyo Hong Kong Barcelona Budapest Sheldon Ekland-Olson, Ph.D. Department of Sociology and Dean, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA William R. Kelly, Ph.D. Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA Series Editors: Alfred Blumstein School of Urban and Public Affairs, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA David P. Farrington Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 9DT, England Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ekland-Olson, Sheldon, 1944- Justice under pressure / Sheldon Ekland-Olson, William R. Kelly. p. cm.-(Research in criminology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13:978-1-4613-9519-5 1. Prisons-Texas. 2. Parole-Texas. 3. Criminal justice, Administration of-Texas. 4. Recidivism-Texas. I. Kelly, William R. (William Robert), 1950- . II. Title. III. Series. HV9475.T4E55 1993 364.9764-dc20 92-42354 Printed on acid-free paper. © 1993 Springer-Verlag New York Inc. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1993 Copyright is not claimed for work by U.S. Government employees. All rights reserved. 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Typeset by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN-13:978-1-4613-9519-5 e-ISBN-13:978-1-4613-9517-1 DOl: 10.1007/978-1-4613-9517-1 Preface By the late 1980s, it was quite clear that a revolution had taken place in the way the nation's prisons were being built and run. Court-ordered reforms, grounded largely in a concern with overcrowded conditions, brought internal administrative adjustments. These court-induced policy shifts were supplemented and in some cases countered by tough-talking politicians willing to pass a wide range of prison-filling laws. In the process, prison construction became, quite literally, a growth industry. This was nowhere more apparent than in California, where use-a-gun, go-to-prison laws and other mandatory sanctions were instituted. Almost immediately, media pundits were heard either praising or decrying California's multibillion dollar construction efforts, the first substantial prison construction in the state in twenty years. Those supporting con struction challenged not-in-my-backyard protests with consultant reports underscoring the economic benefit prisons offered local economies. These consultant reports, in turn, were countered by you-can't-build-yourself out-of-the-crime-problem advocates. More money for prisons meant less for job programs and fewer early childhood education and nutrition efforts-i.e., fewer resources to address the very conditions that seemed to be producing the ever-growing supply of criminals. To many observers, California and other states were embarking on an economic course at once ineffectual and self-destructive. Prisons, which are expensive to build and more expensive to run, were being filled as fast as they were built. There was no detectable letup in the crime rate. Gangs in the state's major metropolitan regions continued to expand. All the while, the nation watched as this massively funded experiment in prison construction unfolded. It was during the mid-to-Iate 1980s that Texas began seriously consider ing a prison construction effort of its own. Prodded by federal court decisions, legislators began contemplating whether to develop alternatives to incarceration or to become players in a catch-up construction game. It was in the climate of this debate that we decided to undertake the research reported in this book. v vi Preface In their consideration of alternatives to prison, Texas legislators shifted much of the management of the prison population crisis to the Parole Board. The board developed early release strategies as well as scales to predict high-risk parolees. At the same time, the state legislature began laying the groundwork for embarking on a prison-building program, which by the early 1990s would rival the program undertaken in California. What we wanted to find out was whether this shift in policy made any difference in the crime rate. More particularly, did the shift make any difference in that portion of the crime rate related to the revolving prison door? Were persons released on parole more or less likely to return to prison sooner given the changes taking place in the administration of justice? To pursue these questions, we approached the research arm of the Board of Pardons and Paroles as well as the Texas Prison System and the Texas Department of Public Safety to secure the relevant data sets. The research would not have been possible without their assistance, and it is hereby gratefully acknowledged. In addition, we applied to the National Institute of Justice and the University Research Institute at the University of Texas at Austin for funding support. These grants, too, were critical to the eventual completion of the project. The first year and a half we spent collecting, coding, and analyzing the data. Portions of the early findings were reported at professional meetings and eventually published in the Law and Society Review (Kelly and Ekland-Olson 1991) and Crime and Delinquency (Ekland-Olson, Kelly, and Eisenberg 1992a). Upon publication we became convinced that it was also useful to work on a longer piece that brought all the findings under a single cover. Hence this book. In preparing this book we have benefitted from the critical efforts of a number of people. Mark Warr, Jim Austin, Tom Pollum, Joan Petersilia, Susan Turner, Pablo Martinez, and Daniel Glaser provided useful com ments and assistance on early drafts. Edie Van Cleve was invaluable in the editorial and manuscript preparation phases of the project. Our spouses, Dr. Marie Crane and Carolyn Ekland-Olson, critiqued, prodded, and encouraged our efforts throughout. We are most grateful for their enduring support. Finally, each of the senior authors extends his thanks to the other for his colleagueship in the best sense of that term. The work simply would not have been possible without equal effort throughout. Ethnicity and the Politics of Editing Whenever you divide the world into a small number of ethnic categories, say three as we have done in this volume, you seriously distort reality. You gloss over important distinctions. You also run the risk of offending. This point was brought home as we went into the final phases of produc tion. A member of the editorial staff called to inquire, in apologetic Preface vii tones, about a "sensitive question." It had to do with our use of the term "Anglo." Several colleagues in the editor's office were offended. Why not use the more conventional "White?" The offended were not Anglo they were Greek or Italian, besides wasn't Anglo a derogatory term? As the conversation continued, the editor related that the only manu scripts she ever saw using Anglo were from the Southwest-Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. She was a bit relieved that Anglo wasn't a derogatory epithet-Gringo was the term she had in mind. Several alternatives were suggested. "White" was problematic since many Hispanics or Latinos considered themselves members of that category. "Americans of European Extraction" might work but it too glossed over differences and was cumbersome. The acronym AMEX might be used, but it carried with it credit card implications and came close to some variation on the often-heard Tex-Mex. The more we talked the more elusive the resolution became. Was it not also the case that African-American, Hispanic, and Latino glossed over important differences. Many African Americans stop tracing their ancestry in the Caribbean, others in Brazil or other Latin American countries populated by the African diaspora. Among Latinos, Mexican Americans identify with a different heritage than do persons from Guatemala, EI Salvador, Chile, Peru, or Cuba. In the end, with apologies to our friends in the editor's office and any others who rightly recognize the inaccuracies in any tri-ethnic categoriza tion of ancestral heritage, we decided to stick with our more immediate southwestern surroundings and make comparisons between Latinos, African-Americans, and Anglos. Contents Preface.... . ... ...... ....... ...... . ......... ................ ....... . v Chapter 1 National Trends and the Assessment of Prison Crowding...................................... 1 National Tends-1975 through 1989 ....................... 1 A Sea-Change in Prisoner Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Assessing the Impact of Litigated Prison Reform ............ 7 Chapter 2 Population, Political, and Judicial Pressures on the Texas Criminal Justice System .................... 13 The Texas Prison Crowding Crisis .......................... 13 Pressure from the Media ................................. 15 Pressure from the Federal Court .......................... . 18 The Legislative Response ................................ . 20 Pressure Moves to the Parole System ...................... . 22 The Legislature Restructures the Criminal Justice System .... . 26 The Study Design ...................................... . 28 Chapter 3 Intra-Cohort Variation in Reincarceration .... . . . . . . .. 30 Characteristics of the Pooled 1984 and 1985 Cohorts ......... 30 Reincarceration Offense Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 48 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 50 Chapter 4 Inter-Cohort Comparisons of Reincarceration Rates ... 52 Trends in Reincarceration ................................ 53 Correlates of Recidivism across Cohorts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 57 Conclusion ............................................. 64 ix x Contents Chapter 5 Multivariate Prediction of Reincarceration . . . . . . . . . . .. 67 Analysis of Parole Outcome .............................. 67 Data and Model Fitting .................................. 68 Analysis of Survival Time ................................ 78 Conclusion ............................................. 84 Chapter 6 An Evaluation of the Legislative Response: The Prison Management Act. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 85 Background of the Prison Management Act. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 85 Operation of the Prison Management Act. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Data and Methods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 91 Results............................................. .... 92 Conclusion .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 103 Chapter 7 Incarceration and Crime: Is There a Link? . . . . . . . . . . .. 105 Incarceration and Crime. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 105 National and Two-State Comparisons ...................... 110 Alternative Explanations for Varying Trends in California and Texas ............................................ 116 Conclusion ............................................. 118 Chapter 8 Conclusions and Policy Implications ................. 120 The Back-Door Solution: Parole Release ................... 120 The Front Door Solution: Intermediate Sanctions ............ 123 Increasing Prison Capacity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 125 Appendix A: Salient Factor Score ......................... 130 Appendix B: Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles (BPP) Regions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 132 References ....................................... . . . . .. 133 Index .................................................. 139 1 National Trends and the Assessment of Prison Crowding In the early 1980s, prison crowding was proclaimed "the most critical administrative problem facing the United States criminal justice system" (Blumstein 1983, 229). While debates emerged over the meaning of "crowding" as the decade unfolded (Sherman and Hawkins 1981; Gaes 1985), there are few today who would dispute that crowded prison con ditions were the major driving force for the administration of criminal justice in the 1980s. By mid-decade, all but eleven states had at least one prison considered "overcrowded," according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. These conditions were litigated in all but a handful of states. Moreover, the National Institute of Justice reported that the number one problem as perceived by judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and correctional officers was prison crowding. In perception and fact, available cell space along with other measures of the ratio of inmates and resources occupied a central place among criminal justice policymakers. This book is about the pressures generated by these strained resources and in particular how judicial, legislative, and correctional responses to these pressures may have affected crime rates and the prison population. National Trends-1975 through 1989 Table 1.1 presents annual data on the total number of prisoners in carcerated in state prisons as well as the incarceration rate (i.e., the number of inmates incarcerated per 100,000 resident population). During the fifteen years between 1975 and 1989, the inmate population housed in state facilities grew by 182 percent. In 1975, there were 216,462 inmates in state prisons. By 1985, only ten years later, the prison population had doubled to 436,021. Between 1980 and 1989, the number of state inmates rose by 114 percent. In the last half of the 1980s alone, the number of prisoners increased by 40 percent. Clearly, the decade of the 1980s was one of tremendous growth in the number of persons incarcerated. This 1