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Extension of Current Estimates of Redemption Times: Robustness Testing, Out-Of-State Arrests, and Racial Differences

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Extension of Current Estimates of Redemption Times: Robustness Testing, Out-Of-State Arrests, and Racial Differences The author(s) shown below used Federal funds provided by the U.S. Department of Justice and prepared the following final report: Document Title: Extension of Current Estimates of Redemption Times: Robustness Testing, Out-of-State Arrests, and Racial Differences Author: Alfred Blumstein, Kiminori Nakamura Document No.: 240100 Date Received: November 2012 Award Number: 2009-IJ-CX-0008 This report has not been published by the U.S. Department of Justice. To provide better customer service, NCJRS has made this Federally- funded grant final report available electronically in addition to traditional paper copies. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Extension of Current Estimates of Redemption Times: Robustness Testing, Out–of-State Arrests, and Racial Differences Final Report Submitted to the National Institute of Justice Grant No. 2009-IJ-CX-0008 October 2012 Alfred Blumstein The Heinz College Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Ave. Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Phone: 412-268-8269 Fax: 412-268-5338 Email: [email protected] Kiminori Nakamura Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice University of Maryland 2220 LeFrak Hall College Park, MD 20742 Phone: 301-405-5477 Fax: 301-405-4733 Email: [email protected] This project was supported by Grant No. 2009-IJ-CX-0008 awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the US Department of Justice. i This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Abstract As information technology has increased the accessibility of criminal-history records, and concern for negligent-hiring lawsuits has grown, criminal background checking has become an important part of the hiring process for most employers. As a result, there is a growing concern that a large number of individuals are handicapped in finding employment because of a stale criminal-history record. The current study is an extension of a NIJ-funded project intended to provide the empirical estimates of what we call “redemption time,” the time when an individual with a prior arrest record has stayed clean of further involvement with the criminal justice system sufficiently long to be considered “redeemed” and relieved of the stale burden of a prior criminal-history record. In the current study, we address new issues that that are important in moving the research on redemption forward and making the findings applicable to relevant policy. In the first section, we introduce the background of this project by discussing the increasing use of criminal background checks by employers, the potential size of population with criminal records that such background checking can affect, and our initial research on redemption that empirically examines when a criminal record loses its relevance in predicting future crime (“redemption times”). In the second section, we explore the issue of robustness of redemption time estimates. In our previous project, we generated our estimates of redemption times using rap sheets from New York State of individuals first arrested in 1980. Using additional data from 1985 and 1990 sampling years in New York as well as data from two additional states, Florida and Illinois, we test the sensitivity of the 1980 New York results to these alternative data. The results show that ii This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. the redemption time estimates are reasonably robust across sampling years and states, and the range of estimates is presented to summarize the results. In the third section, we examine the relationship between the crime type of the first crime event and the crime type of a possible second arrest. This recognizes that employers are concerned mostly about particular types of offense that their employees may commit, based on the nature of the job position. We estimate the recidivism risk and redemption time of particular second-offense types, focusing particularly on violent and property crimes, often an employer’s primary concern, based on the prior offense type and age at the prior. We find that the prior crime type is associated with the recidivism crime type and thus redemption time, especially for violence, and the association is more prominent for older offenders. We also find that that association diminishes as time since the prior increases. In the fourth section, we address the relationship between race and longer-term recidivism risk, which is relevant to the concern of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that criminal background checks have a disparate impact on minorities. The results show that 1) the racial rearrest-risk ratio is smaller than the arrest-prevalence ratio, and 2) the rearrest-risk ratio declines over time, so that the recidivism risk of blacks approaches the risk of whites over time. In the last two sections, we conclude this report by summarizing our findings, discuss future work, and describe our outreach efforts to disseminate our findings on this important public policy issue to stakeholders. iii This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 A. Prevalence of Criminal Background Checking and Criminal Records ........................ 4 B. Relevance of Criminal-History Record ........................................................................ 6 C. Redemption ................................................................................................................... 8 2. Robustness of Redemption Patterns ................................................................................. 8 A. Robustness across Sampling Years .............................................................................. 9 i. Changes in Crime Patterns over the Last Three Decades ....................................... 10 ii. Data ......................................................................................................................... 15 iii. Approaches and Results .......................................................................................... 16 iv. Robustness of Redemption Times across Sampling Years ..................................... 25 B. Robustness across States ............................................................................................ 28 i. Data ......................................................................................................................... 29 ii. Approaches and Results .......................................................................................... 30 C. Robustness of Redemption Times across States......................................................... 37 D. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 39 3. Concern about the “Next Crime” ................................................................................... 42 A. Employer’s Concern about Particular Crime Types ................................................... 42 B. Data ............................................................................................................................. 44 C. Approaches and Results.............................................................................................. 45 i. Crime-switch matrix ............................................................................................... 45 ii. Crime-type specific hazard ..................................................................................... 51 D. Redemption-Time Estimates ...................................................................................... 54 i. Redemption benchmarks ......................................................................................... 57 E. Discussion ................................................................................................................... 59 4. Race and Recidivism Risk in the Context of Redemption ............................................. 61 A. Concern over the Role of Race in Criminal Background Checking ........................... 61 B. Relative Arrest Experience of Blacks and Whites ...................................................... 62 C. Long-Term Patterns of Recidivism
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