“BACK‐END SENTENCING” AND REIMPRISONMENT: INDIVIDUAL, ORGANIZATIONAL, AND COMMUNITY PREDICTORS OF PAROLE SANCTIONING DECISIONS*

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2010.00201.x
• Author: RYKEN GRATTET,JEFFREY LIN,JOAN PETERSILIA
• Published date: 01 August 2010
• Date: 01 August 2010

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“BACK-END SENTENCING” AND

REIMPRISONMENT: INDIVIDUAL,

ORGANIZATIONAL, AND COMMUNITY

PREDICTORS OF PAROLE

SANCTIONING DECISIONS*

JEFFREY LIN

Department of Sociology and Criminology

University of Denver

RYKEN GRATTET

Department of Sociology

University of California, Davis

JOAN PETERSILIA

Stanford Law School

Stanford University

KEYWORDS: parolees, sentencing, race and ethnicity, focal concerns,

hierarchical modeling

An understudied contributor to the massive growth of American

incarceration is an increase in the practice of reimprisoning parolees

* Funding for the California Parole Study came from the National Institute of

Justice (NIJ Award 2005-U-CX-026). Additional support was provided by the

University of California, Irvine’s Center for Evidence-Based Corrections and the

Institute for Governmental Affairs at the University of California, Davis. The

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and particularly the

Division of Adult Parole Operations, the Board of Parole Hearings, and the

Offender Information Services Branch were close collaborators during the 3-year

project. Graduate students at the University of California, Davis and the

University of California, Irvine assisted in data collection and analysis, including

Teresa Casey, Ryan Fischer, Demetra Kalogrides, Danielle Rudes, Julie Siebens,

and Monica Williams. Colleagues Diane Felmlee, Eric Grodsky, John Hipp, Scott

Phillips, Xiaoling Shu, and Susan Turner provided assistance with research design

and methodology. Direct correspondence to Jeffrey Lin, Department of

Sociology and Criminology, University of Denver, 2000 E. Asbury Avenue,

Sturm Hall 440, Denver, CO 80208 (e-mail: Jeffrey.Lin@du.edu).



2010 American Society of Criminology

CRIMINOLOGY V

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UMBER

3 2010 759

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760 LIN, GRATTET & PETERSILIA

through parole board revocations—now referred to as “back-end sen-

tencing.” To conduct the analyses outlined in this article, we use data

from the California Parole Study to analyze the effects of three clusters

of factors (parolees’ characteristics, organizational pressures, and com-

munity conditions) on these sentences. Our analyses are informed by

theories that have been used to explain “front-end” (court) sentences,

which center on the focal concerns of social-control agents, labeling,

and racial threat. Our results indicate that status characteristics—race/

ethnicity and gender—affect the likelihood that criminal parole viola-

tors are reimprisoned. Moreover, certain “pivotal categories” of parol-

ees—registered sex offenders and those who have committed “serious”

or “violent” offenses—are much more likely to be returned to prison

than others. Organizational pressure (prison crowding) also affects the

likelihood of reimprisonment. Communities’ political punitiveness

affects the likelihood that technical violators are reimprisoned and that

serious or violent offenders are reimprisoned for criminal violations. In

this article, we use these findings to consider ways that mass incarcera-

tion is driven by both top-down policies as well as bottom-up organiza-

tional and community forces.

MASS INCARCERATION AND

PAROLE REVOCATION

As is now well documented, the United States recently has experienced

a dramatic and unexpected growth in its prison populations (e.g., Garland,

2001; Western, 2006). Between 1990 and 2006, the number of inmates held

in state prisons more than doubled (from 684,544 to 1,377,815), and the

number of state prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents increased from 272 to

445 (Beck and Harrison, 2001; Sabol, Couture, and Harrison, 2007). This

growth has strained the physical and logistical capacities of state correc-

tional systems, stretched state budgets, and had particularly harmful

effects on poor and minority—particularly Black—offenders and commu-

nities (Clear, 2007; Jacobson, 2006; Pager, 2007; Western, 2006). Offenders

sent to prison through criminal court sentences have contributed substan-

tially to the prison boom, but so have parolees returning to prison via

parole revocations, although the significance of this latter process is less

recognized and even less understood (Travis, 2007). Parolees who are

arrested for new crimes or who violate other conditions of parole supervi-

sion can be returned to prison by state parole boards—what some have

called back-end sentencing (Blumstein and Beck, 2005; Travis, 2007; see

also Knapp, 1993). In recent years, back-end sentences have comprised a

growing percentage of all prison admissions. Travis (2007) reported that

nationally, the proportion of prison admissions made up of individuals

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BACK-END SENTENCING 761

being returned to prison by parole boards rose from 18 percent in 1980 to

34 percent in 2000.

In California, which contains almost one sixth of all American parolees,

those returning from parole surpassed new felon admissions in 1987 as the

largest group of offenders entering state prisons (California Department

of Corrections, 2001; Petersilia, 2008). By 2005, more than 60 percent of

California prison admissions were individuals returning from parole (Cali-

fornia Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 2006).

1

Mass incar-

ceration thus seems to be increasingly a result of the largely hidden

dynamic of returning parolees to prison rather than court-ordered impris-

onments for new felony offenses alone (Clear, 2007; Jacobsen, 2006;

Mauer, 2006; Petersilia, 2003; Simon, 2000; Useem and Piehl, 2008).

To date, however, empirical research about imprisonment has focused

almost exclusively on “front-end sentences”—those delivered in criminal

courts in response to the criminal behavior of convicted offenders. Rela-

tively little attention has been paid to back-end sentences—specifically,

those given by parole boards to parolees who are accused of violating their

conditions of supervision. Understanding the empirical reality of mass

incarceration therefore requires a consideration of factors that drive both

front-door and back-door prison intake. In addition, research on the

growth in imprisonment has been almost exclusively macrosociological,

focusing on shifts in penology, policy, and political economy as sources of

the imprisonment binge. A commonly noted tendency in such work is to

assume a close coupling between policy and practice, between discourse

and action, between macrosociological patterns and microsociological

moments, and between structural changes and the character of decision

making that affects imprisonment patterns. Seldom examined is how mass

incarceration emerges as an outcome of the everyday practices of situated

actors within the criminal justice system.

In this article, by elaborating and refining theories from research on

front-end sanctioning and labeling research, we investigate predictors of

parole board revocation decisions in California within three conceptual

clusters of factors (individual characteristics, organizational constraints,

and the conditions of parolees’ communities). Examining how these fac-

tors contribute to the likelihood that parolees will be returned to prison

allows us to link the institutional and structural changes occurring at the

macrosociological level to system actors’ microsociological decisions.

1. In 2005, 38 percent of California prison admissions were new felons sentenced by

criminal courts (i.e., they were not on parole), 15 percent were parolees who

received new convictions in criminal courts, and 47 percent were parolees who

had their parole revoked by the parole board (California Department of Correc-

tions and Rehabilitation, 2006).