The article, “The Changing State of Recidivism: Fewer People Going Back to Prison,” and its methodology omit a lot of data that would make its study stronger and more comprehendible. For example, they only take into account twenty three out of the fifty states. That is less than half, meaning that a lot of data is being left out that could either prove their conclusion invalid or make it even stronger in the eyes of the reader.  Also, while Pew had access to some things that BJS didn’t, such as access to all released prisoners every year, there were other things that they were restricted from. For example, they didn’t have access to FBI criminal history records, so they were unable to collect information on rearrests.  Basically, there were a lot of gaps between what each study group could obtain data from. Toward the end of the article, it speaks on how reducing recidivism improves different things throughout society, yet there was no data to back that up either. The article just simply listed different things that it improves. Without evidence, it is hard to ensure your audience that what you’re saying is accurate.

The article The Changing State of Recidivism: Fewer People Going Back to Prison shows a radical decrease in the amount of prisoners who go back to prison after they are released since 2005. This paper uses the data from 23 states from 2005 through 2015. I believe that the results of this paper are impressive, however it should be taken with a grain of salt. The data does not account for prisoners who returned to prison in a different state and also uses less than half the states in the US. It is very difficult to actually find sufficient data and the authors did a great job of addressing this concern in the article. The authors also provided some other sources that in conjunction could be used to form an opinion.

The study is a very interesting read and my obvious next question would be: why are prisoners less likely now than in 2005 to return to prison? What type of factors could be causing this change? I am curious if the prison system is  improving or if it is an outside factor driving past prisoners to remain outside bars. The judicial system may also be prosecuting less prisoners, so in order to determine if the prison system is actually improving, I would like to review a couple other different data sources. The first data set I would review is arrest numbers across all 23 states. If arrests are continuously decreasing, then these results would be expected. The next aspect I would look at is the amount of court cases that result in the defendant going to prison (conviction rate?). A lower percentage would also imply a decrease in prison returns.

Overall, I believe that this study individually is not enough to form a conclusive argument. However in addition to other reliable sources, it provides strong evidence of the decrease in prison returns, hence an increase in effectiveness of US prisons.

What I found most interesting in the The Changing State of Recidivism article was the table of statistics about small differences in prisoner characteristics at the end of the methodology section that showed the different original offenses, genders, and age at release year for prisoners from 23 states. This was done with three different columns that compared the percentage of the group that was released in 2005, the percentage of the group that was released in 2012, and showed the difference between these two.  A few different aspects of this chart stuck out to me. The first thing was the difference between the male and female release percentages. First off, in both the 2005 release and the 2012 release, the difference in male to female release percentages is approximately 76%, males being the higher percentage in both cases. The ratio of male to females being released was extremely high, much higher than I would have guessed, and it was practically consistent from 2005 to 2012. In addition, from 2005 to 2012, the male release percentage decreased by exactly 0.4% and the female percentage increased by exactly 0.4%. This shows that although there is an extremely high male to female release ratio, it is potentially getting lower very slowly over time. The other aspect of the chart that interested me was the fact that the 18-34 year old age group release rate from 2005 to 2012 increased (by 0.4%) and the 35-54 year old age group actually decreased by 3.0%. For some reason that middle age group of 25-54 is decreasing its release rate over time, while the younger age group of 18-34 is very slowly increasing. A final aspect of the chart that stood out to me was that violence crime release rates increased by 3.0% from 2005 to 2012, while drug crime release rates decreased by 4.3%. Both of these are somewhat significant changes, and led me to contemplate why each occurred.

As for something a classmate said, I would like to reference Mia Gates annotation saying “Important to note that the data was submitted voluntarily. That makes me wonder why certain states opted out, and if certain data was omitted.” I thought this was an interesting point and made me think about which states were included in the data and why. I noted that only two of the northeast states (New York, Pennsylvania) volunteered their information about recidivism and pondered why there was such a lack of representation from the northeast, the place where I go to school and live at home.

First, I enjoyed reading the blog titled: “Social Science History: Survival of the “fittest.” I thought the person gave a great summary of the article and related it to class well.   For this week, as I mentioned this in my annotation, this article presents some very positive things, while also leaving the reader wanting more.  First,  it is obviously great that fewer people are heading back to prison after going to prison.  However, the conclusions we can draw from that are slightly limited because the study only examined 23 states.  Since this study followed those same states from 2005, I think we can only conclude that fewer people are going back to prison in those states.   Lastly, I think understanding why fewer people are going back to prison is important.  Meaning, understanding what states are doing right is very important in this context so they can better allocate resources.

Despite the forefront of this article being about recidivism (the share of people who return to state prison three years after being released), I chose to highlight a small detail that might go unnoticed. This is the lack of data readily available for the conductors of this study. Throughout the first few weeks of this semester, I’ve noticed this common trend involving data and the difficulty to obtain it. This article has a lot of similarities to the Eviction Lab, where many areas had unreported data on evictions. Here, the lack of data surrounding prisoners “has complicated efforts to understand the aggregate effects of myriad federal, state, and local efforts to reduce reoffending”. Missing or unclear data can lead to inconclusive conclusions.

The Changing State of Recidivism: Fewer People Going Back to Prison Response

These articles discuss the decline in recidivism in certain states around the United States and how there are fewer people going back to prison. Our authors discuss how data shows that the number of prisoners being reincarcerated after being released for 3 years has dropped about 25% since the previous report completed in 2005. The process of how all prisoners are logged and how through them acting as data points in the grand scheme of the prison system make it easier to collect data on their crime, their sentence and whether they entered back once they were released. Though interesting, there were two aspects of this article that I did not quite understand. First, I did not understand how the lack of specifics on each prisoner’s case “has complicated efforts to understand the aggregate effects of myriad federal, state, and local efforts to reduce reoffending” (Gelb).  Secondly, luckily to classmate ‘mgates’ I saw that states had the option to not provide information. This makes me question how valid this data collected is. Unless things are getting worse why would states withhold their data?

I found the Fogel and Engerman article extremely interesting because of its focus on the growth of data collection over time involving labor, health, and socioeconomic conditions. The data from early revolutionary America revealing that people of poor nutrition experienced higher death rates and lack of labor ability. Obviously this is something we understand today but early data collection in the 1800’s showed this as factual and influenced ideas around labor and nutrition for the future. Data collection advanced into the late 1900’s when the DAE began to collect data on inter generational families in order to understand linkage to women in the workforce and migration statistics. This data can be used to understand labor patterns throughout the history of the United States and help prepare for the future.

In the Asimov excerpt the study of psychohistory highlights the fact that data is more than just numbers. The chapter starts off as using psychohistory as a “nonmathematical” (yet sorta mathematical) concept that deals with human conglomerates to fix social and economic issues. The readings reflect the fact that to arrive to fixing these social and economic issues, there isn’t only one data set or statistic that will answer those questions. The foreword by Fogel on Labor Productivity, too, emphasizes that the macroeconomic question could not be answered without looking at the microeconomic relations between laborers and their careers. Although microeconomics focuses on the small scale interpersonal economics, it heavily contributed to the macroeconomic hypothesis in the study. Both these readings show that the social issues we try to solve are never answered through one set of mathematical data, but rather through the relations and trends between multiple data sets recorded by our society.

If I’m being honest, I enjoyed the psycho history reading. It was pretty fun and felt like it come out of a futuristic sci-fi novel. The problem is I don’t actually know where it comes from. Echoing the concerns of “Sjalloway” I’m not sure what the context or background of this story is at all. Who are the characters, what are they doing, what is “Trantor”. None of these questions seem relevant to our coursework, or maybe they should be. I’m not sure at all where psychohistory fits in to our course. In fact I’m not sure where it fits in at all. The process seems rather arbitrary and I don’t know what information is backing what they are doing. Additionally, why is it called psychohistory if it is primarily math based. This reading leaves me very confused about what I’m looking at and I’m hoping things will get cleared up in class.