Recidivism Rates: What You Need to Know
Topics:
Program Quality and Performance Measurement
The rate at which people return to prison following release is a key measure of the performance of the nation’s criminal justice system, yet national statistics on recidivism are rare. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) publishes such statistics only every three years.
This brief from the Council on Criminal Justice summarizes the key takeaways from the report released in July 2021 and analyzes the takeaways in the context of previous findings.