Recidivism for offenders who successfully completed the Community Alternatives to Prison Program in relation to age, race, and substance addiction

The Durational and Recidivism Study conducted by the Tennessee Sentencing Commission and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s Statistical Analysis Center (1995) examined the recidivism rates for prisoners released from Tennessee prisons for a period of two years after their release. In response to this study, the administrators of the Community Alternatives to Prison Program (CAPP) were interested in finding the rate of recidivism for the offenders that successfully completed their program. The study included checking for new arrests for two years following successful completion of CAPP. In operation since 1984, CAPP had collected data but it had not been analyzed or used as a part of the program’s evaluation. Prison crowding has necessitated the search for prison alternatives (Geimaro, 1992). The three types of alternatives include boot camps, electronic monitoring, and day reporting (CAPP). However, research supporting the effectiveness of day reporting on the rate of recidivism is limited. More specifically, there is none for CAPP. Factors that have been important predictors in previous studies of recidivism include age, race, and substance addiction. Furthermore, there was a need to determine the relationship between recidivism and age, race, and substance addiction for CAPP-sentenced offenders. The recidivism rate for CAPP was found to be 5.9%, which is lower than the recidivism rate of 53.5% for offenders released from the Tennessee State prison system. A chi-square analysis was significant, x²(1, N=3954) = 141.737, p = .001. Due to the small number of CAPP successful completers who committed a crime, no relationship between recidivism and the identified factors of age, race, and substance addiction was established.