Prisoner Reform Programs , and their Impact on Recidivism

The California prison system has a high percentage of people who return to prison within a three year period after release. A mathematical model is formulated to study the effectiveness of Reentry Court programs for first time offending parolees designed to reduce the prison return rates when implemented alone or in conjugation with an in prison educational program. Parolees who participated in both in/out of prison programs are referred to as an ideal class in the model. Stability analysis and numerical simulations were carried out to study the impact of the programs. The results show that the reentry program reduces the recidivism rate more than the Basic Educational program within the prison system, but only when social influence of criminals is low outside of prison. However, for populations with high rates of social influences, incarceration rates should be large in order to get the same impact of the reentry program.