Studying Parole Revocation Practices: Accounting for Dependency Between Competing Events

When individuals are released from prison, they typically enter a period of post confinement community supervision. While under community supervision, their behaviors are subject to special conditions requiring them to report to supervisors and prohibiting certain behaviors such as drug and alcohol use. Many supervisees are returned to prison because they violate those special conditions, or because they commit minor crimes that would not result in prison were they not being supervised. But others are returned to prison for serious new crimes. We distinguish the two as nuisance behaviors (the former) and pernicious behaviors (the latter). Our research applies competing events survival analysis to distinguish a structural model that accounts for nuisance behaviors from a structural model that accounts for pernicious behaviors. We demonstrate that returning offenders to prison for technical violations and minor crimes may reduce the incidence of major crimes because the occurrence of nuisance behaviors and pernicious behaviors are highly correlated. Our findings support the theory that nuisance behaviors signal the likelihood of pernicious behaviors.