Seminar
Abstract: The social and economic structure of a neighborhood provides important context to prisoner reentry. Disadvantaged neighborhoods have been associated with a decreased presence and quality of labor market opportunities and limited prospects for the development of strong social relationships which are critical for reentry success. In fact, there is initial evidence to suggest that individuals who are return to disadvantaged neighborhoods are more likely to fail on community supervision. We extend previous work by considering the effect of neighborhood context on variation in recidivism timing among a sample of men and women released from prison in one state. In specific, we merge traditional static indicators of failure (e.g., age, gender) with a series of time-variant covariates to understand how moving or changes in social relationships (e.g., marriage) or housing arrangements (e.g., halfway house) affect recidivism. The goal of the research is to provide important insight into the process of prisoner reentry and augment the existing theoretical work on recidivism.