Changing Places: The Role of Household and Community Context in Long-Term Patterns of Recidivism

Abstract

The period of reentering society after prison is a critical time in the life-course and presents numerous challenges. With whom and where individuals live can determine aspects of social support, as well as bonds and informal social control that may predict whether a person “succeeds” by abstaining from crime and avoiding technical violations of parole. We use detailed administrative data from a release cohort in Missouri to construct monthly variation in household and community context at two levels (neighborhood disadvantage and county-level rural-urban designation). We follow the local-life circumstances approach, decomposing changing context into within and between person variation (Horney et al., 1995). We find important selection effects but also intervention effects – with households including family as particularly beneficial. This work further highlights the needs for multiple measures of recidivism and a broadening of the geographic locales researchers and policymakers consider.