Setting prisoners free is historically associated with jubilation. In practice today, many prisoners are released to the street outside the prison at midnight. A released prisoners has only the clothes and possessions that were on his person at the time of his incarceration. He typically has lost his job and lost his apartment. His driver’s license and credit cards have expired. He may have no money other than a small amount, e.g. $20, given to him at release. Freedom is a worthy cause for shouts of joy. But released prisoners often encounter harrowing struggles just for the basic needs of life that they received within prison.
Relationships that prisoners maintain with persons outside prison help prisoners to secure their basic needs outside prison and to re-integrate into free, law-abiding society. That’s not just common sense. An high-quality quantitative analysis of 16,420 prisoners released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2007 indicates that prisoners who received visits from outsiders had a lower probability of being re-imprisoned (recidivism):
Any visit reduced the risk of recidivism by 13% for felony reconvictions and 25% for technical violation revocations, which reflects the fact that visitation generally had a greater impact on revocations. The findings further showed that more frequent and recent visits were associated with a decreased risk of recidivism. [*]
Increasing opportunities for visiting prisoners is relatively inexpensive compared to the cost of imprisonment. Hence increasing communication between prisoners and the outside world is not merely just and merciful, but also cost-effective.
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Read more:
- broader prisoner communications services market benefits everyone
- how to promote reasonable punishment
- mercy for prisoners among the poor
[*] Duwe and Clark (2011) p. 19. Randomized experiments with prisoner communication liberalization would help control for unobserved prisoner social characteristics in estimating the marginal effects of visitation. Duwe (2012) illustrates use of randomized experiments. More generally, Duwe and Clark (2011) has the typical weaknesses of most current empirical social-science scholarship published in scholarly journals . It reports results of a statistical model (Cox proportional hazard model), but doesn’t report tests of the statistical validity of that model. It doesn’t provide the underlying dataset online for replication and validation of the reported results and for further analysis. It provides only a standard table of descriptive statistics and doesn’t advance broad understanding of the data. With widely available scholarship no longer constrained to 20-30 pages of paper, social science can become much more scientifically credible and intellectually interesting.
References:
Duwe, Grant, and Valerie Clark. 2011. “Blessed Be the Social Tie That Binds: The Effects of Prison Visitation on Offender Recidivism.” Criminal Justice Policy Review. Published online before print December 6, 2011, doi: 10.1177/0887403411429724
Duwe, Grant. 2012. “Evaluating the Minnesota Comprehensive Offender Reentry Plan (MCORP): Results from a Randomized Experiment.” Justice Quarterly, 29:3, 347-383
Doug
Found your website. Agree 100% with your conclusions. Doing HIS Time Prison Ministry started a transportation ministry in 2000 in Denver, CO called Barn-A-BUS with the mandate to “assist the Holy Spirit in keeping families together by providing low cost/no cost transportation to/from the prison where their loved ones are incarcerated” We have four vans full every weekend going to almost every prison in CO. The effects on recidivism are unknown to us, since it is impossible to track each visitor. But we know it is helping. We have a reintegration ministry called 72 Hour Fund that supplies the needs you described, i.e., cloths, paperwork, bus tokens, etc hopefully with in 72 hours of the inmates release, hence the name. Our recidivism rate for these men and women is less than 20%…astounding!
Just hought I would connect…
JIm