Desistance and Legitimacy: The Impact of Offender Notification Meetings on Recidivism among High Risk Offenders

• In Event: Beyond Deterrence: Strategies of Focus and Fairness

Abstract

Legitimacy-based approaches to crime prevention operate under the assumption that individuals—including violent offenders—are more likely to comply with the law when they believe that the law and its agents are legitimate and act in ways that seem inherently “fair” and “just.” While mounting evidence finds an association between such legitimacy-based programs and reductions in aggregate levels of crime and violence, no study has investigated whether such programs influence individual offending. This study evaluates the effectiveness of one such program — Project Safe Neighborhoods’ (PSN) Offender Notification Meetings — at reducing individual recidivism among a population of returning prisoners in Chicago. This study uses a quasi-experimental design and two types of survival analyses to evaluate the effects of PSN on the subsequent recidivism of program participants relative to the control group. Cox hazard models and competing risk models suggest that involvement in PSN significantly reduces the risk of subsequent incarceration. This study provides some of the first individual-level evidence of the efficacy of such programs on patterns of individual offending. Results suggest that interventions such as these do indeed reduce rates of recidivism in the treatment group.

Authors

• Andrew V. Papachristos, Yale University

• Danielle Wallace, Arizona State University

• Tracey Meares, Yale Law School

• Jeffrey Fagan, Columbia University