Recidivism among People Convicted of Gun Offenses: A Call to Better Leverage Reentry Resources to Decrease Gun Violence

Abstract

This study provides a primary step towards exploring whether rehabilitation efforts informed by the risk, needs, responsivity approach should be leveraged to decrease gun violence. Through the use of competing risks survival analyses, we assess the gun offense recidivism patterns of people released from prison that do (n = 1,158) and do not (n = 9,868) have gun crime conviction histories. We then explore whether gun offense recidivism increases along with actuarially based risk, how gun offense histories impact the odds of receiving community-based programming during the transition from prison to the community, and, in turn, whether programming impacts gun offending recidivism. Findings indicate that people with a history of gun offense convictions are at more than twice the hazard of committing gun offenses than similarly situated people without such histories. Predicted subhazards of recidivism and magnitudes of differences between offense history groups increase substantially as actuarially assessed risk for recidivism increases. However, predicted probabilities of receipt of community-based programming do not significantly differ between the groups with and without gun offense histories, and recidivism hazards did not meaningfully differ between those that do and do not receive community-based programs despite their gun offending histories. The results illuminate a need to expand reentry-based services towards addressing the criminogenic needs of people previously convicted of gun offenses.