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50 Fed. Probation 17 (1986)
Felony Probation and Recidivism: Replication and Response

handle is hein.journals/fedpro50 and id is 319 raw text is: Felony Probation and Recidivism: Replication and Response BY GENNARO F. VITO, PH.D. Associate Professor, School of Justice Administration, College of Urban and Public Affairs, University of Louisville* N JANUARY 1985, the Rand Corporation published a report (Petersilia and others, 1985b) which presented data on over 16,000 felons convicted in California's superior court during 1980, as well as recidivism data on a subsample of 1,672 felony probationers from Los Angeles and Alameda counties. Almost immediately, this report attracted a great deal of attention and rekindled public interest in the effectiveness of probation super- vision at a time when incapacitation and punishment of offenders has become the dominant sentiment in corrections and overcrowding plagues our penal in- stitutions. Summaries of this study have been published in three different locations (Petersilia, 1985a, 1985b, and Petersilia et al. 1985a). It has been hailed by one corrections expert (Conrad, 1985b: 71) as the most important criminological research to be reported since World War II. This article presents recidivism data on a sample of felony probationers from Kentucky and provides, on a much smaller scale, several points of comparison with the Rand study. In this fashion, responses to conclusions con- tained in the Rand report will also be discussed. Previous Research on Probation Recidivism In the Rand report, the authors (Petersilia et al., 1985b: 2) state that their study constitutes the first systematic research on felony probation. A more accurate assertion is that the Rand study represents the first large-scale analysis of felony probation. In fact, probation supervision has long been a target of criminological research. For example, a recent Na- tional Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice-sponsored report on the state of the art in probation (Allen et al., 1979) contains a thorough summary of the research on probation supervision published over a 26-year period. Furthermore, since these studies focused on probationers convicted of felonies (ranging from Internal Revenue Service violations to property crimes like forgery and burglary), they represent the pre-Rand study status of probation recidivism research. As summarized by Latessa (Allen et al., 1985: 261), these studies did suffer from some basic methodological weaknesses, the most glaring of which was the failure to define a base... against which to compare findings in order to support a claim that probation is an effective alternative for rehabilitating offenders. The 10 studies summarized in this report generated failure rates defined in various ways (i.e., arrests, convictions, revocation) over different followup periods (ranging from 6 months to 12 years). The recidivism rates took the following forms (Allen et al., 1985: 260): arrest (29.6 percent), arrest and/or conviction (30 and 41.5 per- cent), conviction (16.4 and 17.7 percent) and revoca- tion of probation and incarceration (22.5 to 55 per- cent). Latessa concluded that these studies provide a rule of thumb that probation can be considered to be effective, and that a failure rate above 30 per- cent indicates that it is not effective. Despite the flaws in these studies and their basic lack of comparability, they do provide a benchmark for research on probationer recidivism. Yet, the Rand focus upon felony probationers was a sound basis for a policy study since these offenders, in the absence of probation supervision, would go to prision. The report should serve as a point of comparison for fur- ther study of this subject. As Conrad (1985: 71) has written, replication of the Rand study in some dissimilar settings, may show the way at last to a rational sentencing system and eventually to the substantial reduction of public fright. *A version of this article was presented at the Probation and Parole panel of the Western Society of Criminology meetings in Newport Beach, California, February 28, 1986. This article is drawn from data collected for a larger study con- ducted by the Kentucky Criminal Justice Statistical Analysis Center (SAC). The SAC is funded by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, Grant No. 84-BJ-CX-0013. The Kentucky SAC is housed in the Office of the Attorney General and is operated by the Urban Studies Center at the University of Louisville. Points of view or opinions expressed in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the of- ficial position or policies of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Kentucky Office of the Attorney General, or the University of Louisville. The author wishes to acknowledge the valuable assistance pro- vided by the following persons which made this study possible: Jack B. Ellis, Tony Biggs, and Al Nash of the Urban Studies Center, Robert H. Rhea, Doug Sapp, Danny Yeary, Jerry Nichter, Scott Ward, and C. L. Watts of the Department of Community Services of the Kentucky Corrections Cabinet, Dr. Ronald M. Holmes of the School of Justice Administration, and Joan Peter- silia for her thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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