Notable new data on COVID-era releases and return to prison in California

A few folks have flagged for me this recent CalMatters piece headlined “California released 15,000 prisoners early during COVID. New data reveals what happened to many of them.”  The interesting piece details some notable original data collection on prisoners released early due to COVID in California and also collects (and links to) some comparable data from other jurisdictions.  I recommend the piece in full, and here are some excerpts:

Nearly one-third of California prisoners released early during the pandemic by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration ended up back in prison, according to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation data.

The records, obtained and analyzed by CalMatters, offer the first glimpse into what happened to some of the former prisoners after state leaders chose to shrink a prison population imperiled by the spread of COVID in close quarters. At the time, the governor and the corrections department did not widely share the full list of the names and crimes of the thousands of people they sent home early, leaving the public in the dark about the scope of an unprecedented prisoner release effort.

In total, between April 2020 and December 2021, the corrections department freed about 14,800 people early. Roughly 4,600 had gone back to prison as of Jan. 31, 2025. The data shows that most prisoners who were released early steered clear of serious crimes that would land them back in prison. Thirty people returned to prison for first or second-degree murder offenses, representing fewer than 1% of the group.

The top three reasons people went back to prison were illegally possessing a gun (14% of all cases), assault (10%), and burglary (9%). Vehicle theft, second-degree robbery and domestic abuse each accounted for about 4 to 5% of offenses. The data only includes the offense that gave the prisoner the longest sentence….

The corrections department and other criminal justice agencies define recidivism as when someone is convicted of a new crime within three years of their release. The department mainly uses conviction data to measure recidivism, not return-to-prison rates, according to an agency spokesperson. CalMatters’ data only includes return-to-prison rates, and it’s over a much longer period of time, nearly five years.

According to our analysis, 23% of people released early during the pandemic returned to prison in less than three years.  There’s no baseline rate for returning to prison to compare that figure over a similar time period.  It’s slightly higher than the 17% of people who returned to prison within three years after being released in 2019-2020, according to the department’s most recent recidivism report.

Across the country, researchers at the Robina Institute for Criminal Law and Criminal Justice estimated that nearly 81,000 people were released from prisons in 34 states and the federal prison system during the pandemic.  In 2022, National Public Radio reported that of more than 11,000 people released from federal prison, 442 had returned to prison; 17 committed new crimes.  In Oregon, the governor commuted the sentences of about 950 people between July 2020 through October 2021.  Of those, about 12% ended up back incarcerated within two years of their release, a 2023 report found….

Corrections department spokesperson Albert Lundeen said that the higher return-to-prison rates among those who were released early weren’t uncommon.  “People eligible for expedited release were non-serious/non-violent, a demographic with a higher tendency to recidivate,” he wrote in an email. “It is expected that return rates for this subgroup would be higher than overall recidivism rates.”