“Punishment on the Installment Plan”

As prison populations in the United States have soared over the last 30 years, offenders who are incarcerated for violating the conditions of their parole represent an increasingly large percentage of the overall population. Little is known, however, about who these offenders are, what they have done to be reincarcerated, or what factors make an offender more or less likely to succeed on parole. In this article, parole release data from the National Corrections Reporting Program are analyzed to identify individual-level predictors of parole success in four states and to assess the relative impact of demographic and legal factors on different offender groups (by race).