USSC Recidivism Reports

The U.S. Sentencing Commission, as part of its on-going 15-year-study of the operation of the federal sentencing guidelines, has recently released two sizeable reports on recidivism and the calculations of criminal history under the guidelines. Here are the Commission’s description and links to these reports:

Measuring Recidivism: The Criminal History Computation of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines

The first release in the Research Series on the Recidivism of Federal Offenders, this report examines in detail the predictive statistical power of the Chapter Four Criminal History guidelines. The study uses pre-conviction and instant offense information for a sample of guideline federal offenders sentenced in fiscal year 1992, matched with their post-sentencing criminal behavior collected from FBI records. Both tabular and statistical models of recidivism outcomes report findings by criminal history category and point groupings, as well as by offender demographics, instant offense characteristics, and recidivating offense types.

Recidivism and the “First Offender”

This second release in the Research Series on the Recidivism of Federal Offenders provides an empirical foundation for the Commission’s study of recidivism rates among federal offenders with little or no criminal history prior to the federal instant offense. Using definitional frameworks established in several earlier Commission staff working group studies on “first offenders,” the data documents recidivism risk for three plausible first offender groupings. The analysis reports that recidivism risk is lowest for those offenders with least experience in the criminal justice system.