Putting parolees back in prison: Discretion and the parole revocation process

As the prison population in the United States has ballooned over the past 30 years, people entering prison for parole revocation have come to constitute an increasingly large percentage of all prison admissions (35% in 2006). As a result, researchers have begun to turn their attention toward this criminal justice decision-making point to examine the factors that relate to why an individual is returned to prison. Notably, this developing body of research focuses almost entirely on one decision maker: the parole board who ultimately determines whether or not an individual on parole stays in the community, receives alternative sanctions, or returns to prison. Notably, this ignores the fact that parole revocation is a process beginning with the parolee who commits a violation behavior, turning next to the parole officer who uses his or her discretionary power to determine whether or not to file a complaint, and ending with the decision of the parole board. In this article, we examine each stage of this revocation process using structured qualitative interviews with 35 parole officers as well as quantitative data on 300 individuals on parole in Colorado between 2006 and 2007, who we followed for an 18-month period. We find that parolees with mental health needs commit significantly more technical violations; that race, gender, age, and measures of parolee effort affect whether a parole officer files a complaint; and that the decision made by the parole board is either largely random or driven by variables unspecified in our models.