Prison Plus

The shift from indeterminate to determinate sentencing policies over the past three decades and the ensuing decline in the use of parole for monitoring inmates’ transition back into their communities has led to the development of alternate strategies of post-prison release supervision. The use of alternatives to parole varies considerably across the United States, with some states (e.g., Oregon) requiring that all inmates released from prison be subject to supervision after release from incarceration. In contrast others, such as Florida, mandate the post-release supervision of those offenders who meet a statutorily defined list of criteria, while still allowing for the post-incarceration supervision of offenders who may have been sentenced to an additional sanction of community supervision (i.e., split supervision) to immediately follow their prison sentence. To date, the empirical literature that has examined forms of post-prison release supervision have focused almost exclusively on the use of parole. There is extensive literature relating to various forms of community supervision among offenders diverted from imprisonment, however, there remains a lack of understanding regarding the various effects of split supervision on prisoner reentry employment outcomes for released inmates. This dissertation adds to the literature on post-prison release community supervision by examining the effect of one specific form of post-prison supervision on offender recidivism and employment outcomes: split supervision . Using data from the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC), this paper examines the effects of split supervision in comparison to release from prison with no form of supervision for a cohort of 187,739 inmates released from Florida prisons between January 2004 and December 2011. Given the lack of empirical research surrounding this topic, an extensive analysis of the two groups (those sentenced to a term of split supervision and those sentenced to a term of prison only) is conducted first in order to establish a basis for further analyses. Next, logistic regression and survival analysis methods are used to examine factors that predict who receives split supervision; to predict the likelihood of obtaining employment after release from prison, as well as multiple recidivism outcomes at one, two, and three years after release from incarceration.