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Recent studies suggest that 50% of offenders released from state prisons return to prison within 3 to 5 years. In contrast, this article shows that roughly two of every three offenders who enter and exit prison will never return to prison. Using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ newly revised National Corrections Reporting Program, we examine prison admissions and releases over a 13-year period in 17 states and over shorter periods in other states to determine the rate at which individual offenders return to prison. We distinguish between the traditional event-based sampling methods for studying recidivism and our alternative offender-based method, explaining how each is useful but how the two approaches answer different policy questions.

This finding stands in contrast to the notion that population aging has little explanatory power in describing the growth of prison populations and implies that older inmate groups are more sensitive to compositional changes in the general population. We argue that prediction-based modeling of prison growth should more seriously consider the impacts and consequences of demographic shifts among older prisoner populations.

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Our analysis offers an effective demonstration that supports the use of this method as an important and informative first step toward understanding components of change that affect the problem of prison aging.