UC Irvine

Drawing on recent scholarship on mass incarceration and prisoner re-entry, this study examines the reciprocal relationship between returning parolees and neighbourhood crime rates in five large cities in Texas. Besides the more common approach of counting the number of people on parole in communities (parolee concentration), we propose a novel approach for measuring people on parole by capturing their exposure in the community as parolee embeddedness (i.e., the cumulative number of days that people on parole resided in the neighbourhood). Results show that parolee concentration has a significant positive effect on both violent and property crime, but parolee embeddedness is significantly associated with reductions in violent and property crime. Our findings detect different effects depending on the measurement of people on parole and their community context, illustrating the need to better understand the dynamics of parolee re-entry in the era of mass incarceration.