The Boston Reentry Study: Extensions and Analysis

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NSF 1259013Bruce WesternJanuary 30, 2013Under what conditions will men and women released from prison find work, unite with their families, and desist from crime? As incarceration - concentrated among the most disadvantaged - has climbed to historically high levels, these questions have become basic to understanding contemporary crime and poverty. The Boston Reentry Study aims to study the transition from prison to community by collecting data on former Massachusetts state prisoners, newly-released to the Boston area. Support from NSF expands the study sample from 60 to 100 respondents. The data collection has two main parts. First, a series of interviews is conducted with prisoners who are within a month of release to the Boston area. They are interviewed five times over 12 months, both in prison and after release. The sample includes parolees, probationers, and those who have completed sentences (a largely unstudied population). Second, the project will assess attrition and greatly expand the utility of the survey data by linking to administrative records from the Department of Correction (DOC). DOC records provide information on criminal history, prison conduct and programming, and risk assessment. Respondent data may also be linked to Unemployment Insurance and MassHealth records.Studying the transition from prison to community is particularly challenging because the formerly-incarcerated are an acutely disadvantaged, hard-to-reach population that are only loosely connected to stable households. The Boston Reentry Study has two key objectives: to sustain a high rate of study retention over the course of a year of follow-up with released prisoners, and to explain the reentry process of released prisoners in the areas of employment, family life, and criminal desistance. While earlier studies of the formerly incarcerated were marred by high rates of attrition and other under-coverage, the Boston Reentry Study expects to maintain a high rate of retention in four ways: with interview incentives, regular phone check-ins with respondents, interviews with proxies, and the use of place-based contacts in the community. We also expect the main sources of criminal desistance to arise from stable households, steady employment, and the formal institutional supports of social programs and community supervision. In addition to asking in detail about criminal involvement, education and programming, and employment, the study surveys delve into three areas beyond the reach of previous data collections on prison reentry: ties to families and children, patterns of households and residential mobility, and prison climate.The great scale of US incarceration has made the penal system a key institutional influence on many dimensions of socioeconomic disadvantage. High rates of incarceration have had far-reaching effects on poor urban communities, but the scientific challenge is substantial. Because they are typically weakly attached to households but closely connected to penal and other institutions, released prisoners are commonly overlooked and undercounted in studies of urban inequality and poverty. Understanding an acutely disadvantaged population that is jointly at risk of social and economic failure and under-enumeration, is thus a key task for the analysis of contemporary urban poverty.