Who Gets a Second Chance? Effectiveness and Equity in Supervision of Criminal Offenders

Abstract

Most convicted criminals are sentenced to probation and allowed to return home. On probation, however, a technical rule violation such as not paying fees can result in incarceration. Rule violations account for more than 30% of all prison spells in many states and are significantly more common among black offenders. I test whether technical rules are effective tools for identifying likely reoffenders and deterring crime and examine their disparate racial impacts using administrative data from North Carolina. Analysis of a 2011 reform eliminating prison punishments for technical violations reveals that 40% of rule breakers would go on to commit crimes if their violations were ignored. The same reform also closed a 33% black-white gap in incarceration rates without substantially increasing the black-white reoffending gap. These effects combined imply that technical rules target riskier probationers overall, but disproportionately affect low-risk black offenders. To justify black probationers’ higher violation rate on efficiency grounds, their crimes must be roughly twice as socially costly as that of white probationers. Exploiting the repeat-spell nature of the North Carolina data, I estimate a semi-parametric competing risks model that allows me to distinguish the effects of particular types of technical rules from unobserved probationer heterogeneity. The estimates reveal that the deterrent effects of harsh punishments for rule breaking are negligible. Rules related to the payment of fees and fines, which are common in many states, are ineffective in tagging likely reoffenders and drive differential impacts by race. These findings illustrate the potentially large influence of facially race-neutral policies on racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes. ∗Ph.D. Candidate, U.C. Berkeley Department of Economics; [email protected]. I thank Pat Kline, David Card, Danny Yagan, and Chris Walters for their help and encouragement. This paper has benefited tremendously from comments and suggestions from Alessandra Fenizia, Fred Finan, Ingrid Haegele, Jonathan Holmes, Hilary Hoynes, Peter Jones, Nick Li, Juliana Londoño-Vélez, Maxim Massenkoff, Justin McCrary, Conrad Miller, Steven Raphael, Emmanuel Saez, Jonathan Schellenberg, Yotam Shem-Tov, Francis Wong, and seminar participants at the University of California at Berkeley. I am grateful to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety and Administrative Office of the Courts for their help in securing and understanding the data, as well as to Ginny Hevener, Linda Mitterling, George Pettigrew, Alan Pistick, Cara Stevens, and the officers of the 14th Probation District for their feedback and patience.