Convicts--3 Out of 4 Are Rearrested, Study Finds

More than three out of four convicts released from California prisons, tracked in a Rand Corp. study made public Saturday, were rearrested within three years, almost half the time for serious crimes against persons.

The survey by the Santa Monica-based think tank found that significantly more California ex-convicts return to prison than those in Michigan or Texas, but it speculated that California prisons may be dealing with more hardened criminals to begin with.

The study examined the records of 286 convicts who were released from California prisons in 1978, comparing them with 463 similar cases in Texas and 274 in Michigan.

It found that 76% of the California convicts were rearrested within three years, compared with 60% of those in Michigan and 53% of those in Texas.

Crimes Against People

The study, financed by the U.S. Department of Justice, reported that 43% of those rearrested in California were subsequently convicted of serious crimes that physically or psychologically harmed the victims, such as murder, attempted murder, rape, kidnaping, assault, robbery and burglary.

The figure was 54% in Texas and 29% in Michigan.

However, the California figures may be higher because it takes a worse criminal record to be sentenced to California’s prisons than it does to draw a prison term in the other states, the report suggested.

Although all those studied had been convicted of similar crimes and were about 27 years old when they entered prison, the California group had an average of 2.5 convictions apiece before they were sent to prison, while the figures for Michigan and Texas inmates were 1.9 and 1.7.

“California’s higher recidivism rate may stem from its apparent policy of allowing offenders to develop a longer record of prior offenses before imprisoning them,” commented Stephen P. Klein, principal author of the study.

Based on previous research that included confidential convict reports on how many crimes they had gotten away with, Klein and co-author Michael N. Caggiano estimated that more than 10,000 crimes were probably committed by the California group in the three years after they were freed from prison.

Doubts on Earlier Studies

The study also raised doubts about controversial previous Rand studies, which suggested an unprecedented sentencing policy of “selective incapacitation”--sentencing criminals to longer or shorter terms based on a formula that attempted to predict which criminals would commit the most crimes in the future.

The earlier studies, released in 1982, suggested that scarce prison space could be best utilized by giving longer sentences to “violent predators.” These were defined as criminals who could be predicted to commit the greatest number of serious crimes if they were free, based on factors such as their drug-use record and the age that they were first arrested.

The recommendation set off a national debate in the criminal justice system over what the new study referred to as “the ethical and legal concerns that have been raised about its use--notably penalizing merely potential behavior instead of focusing on actual past behavior.”

‘Did Not Work Very Well’

The new study said six suggested formulas for such predictions “simply did not work very well” when matched against the post-release records of convicts in the study, providing results only 5% to 10% better than chance. The study could not show that the formulas would be significantly more accurate in predicting criminal behavior than the educated hunches of judges and parole boards, it said.

The report concluded that crime could be substantially reduced by imprisoning more criminals for greater lengths of time, but that is “a difficult option to implement because of existing and worsening prison crowding.”

The study suggested that the government “generate support for increasing the resources devoted to correctional institutions, develop considerably less expensive ways of incarcerating offenders, or find other methods (and funds) for closely supervising and monitoring released inmates.”