The Causes and Consequences of Parole Violations in California:
A Multilevel and Policy-Focused Analysis
Principal Investigators: Ryken Grattet, Ph.D., UC Davis and Joan Petersilia, Ph.D., UC Irvine
California leads the nation in sending people on parole back to prison, and parole violators now represent 67% of all admissions to California prisons. Governor Schwarzenegger has made revising parole revocation practices a top priority. Unfortunately, the requisite analysis to guide those reforms does not exist. This study will rectify this situation. California's Youth and Adult Corrections Agency (YACA) has pledged their complete cooperation and access to all necessary data has been assured.
This proposal outlines the first quantitative study to focus on the hidden and highly discretionary process of parole revocation. We will explicitly investigate the role that parolee behavior, parole unit activities, parole staff and supervisor characteristics, and community conditions (including the existence of intermediate sanctions) has on recidivism. We will study three major kinds of recidivism events: recorded violations of the parole agreement, parole revocation, and arrest for a new crime.
We have begun to assemble a dataset from the California Department of Corrections' administrative records of parolee behavior, as well as data on parole units, parole officers, and the communities within which parolees are released. These data track violations, revocations, and arrests for the roughly 120,000 parolees in California from 2003-2004. A descriptive analysis will identify the basic patterns of violations, revocations, and new arrests for selected types of offenders. A hierarchical hazard model will reveal the parolee background, unit, and community factors that affect each of these outcomes. Together these analyses will show us how unit and community factors contribute to the probability a parolee will violate parole, have their parole revoked, and/or commit new crimes; whether technical violations are predictive of new criminal acts; and whether parole agents and units recommend revocation under similar conditions.
This study will make contributions to our knowledge of the parole violation process, which has never been studied in this way. It will provide foundational information for discussions about parole reform and the utility of the revocation process for crime control and offender reintegration. Our findings will also contribute significantly to the scholarly literature on the use and possible abuse of discretion in justice system decisionmaking. For both policy and scholarly reasons, this in-depth look at parole violations could lead to improvements in policy and practice.
