Restitution Payment and Recidivism

• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12401

RESEARCH ARTICLE

RESTITUTION PAYMENT AND

RECIDIVISM

Restitution Payment and Recidivism

An Experimental Analysis

R. Barry Ruback

Lauren K. Knoth

Penn State University

Andrew S. Gladfelter

William Paterson University

Brendan Lantz

Florida State University

Research Summary

Restitution is court-ordered payment by an offender to compensate a crime victim for

direct tangible losses resulting from the crime. Making regular restitution payments,

it has been argued, may serve as a continual reminder to offenders of the harm they

caused and their need to restore justice. In this study, we examined the recidivism

of offenders who were delinquent in paying restitution and who had participated in

a prior experiment aimed at testing whether receiving monthly letters would increase

their payment of restitution. Findings from that experiment revealedthat offenders who

had received letters containing information about the economic sanctions they had paid

and what they still owed paid a significantly larger proportion of the restitution owed

and made significantly more monthly payments than did offenders in the other three

experimental conditions. Results of the present follow-upstudy revealed that even though

We thank the staff of the Centre County Department of Probation and Parole, particularly Tom Young, its

Director, for their help with the original experiment. We also thank Cynthia Kempinen and Leigh Tinik at the

Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing and staff at the Pennsylvania State Police for their help with the

recidivism data. We thank Maureen Outlaw and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The

findings, conclusions, and points of view expressed in this article are solely those of the authors. This research

was funded by Grant #1127014 from the Law and Social Section of the National Science Foundation (Barry

Ruback, PI). Direct correspondence to R. Barry Ruback, Department of Sociology and Criminology, 211 Oswald

Tower, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802 (e-mail: bruback@psu.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12401 C2018 American Society of Criminology 789

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 17 rIssue 4

Research Article Restitution Payment and Recidivism

recidivists (as measured by a new arrest) and nonrecidivists did not differ significantly

in the amount of restitution they owed, nonrecidivists were more likely to have paid

something toward the restitution they owedand more likely to have made more monthly

payments. Statistical tests indicated that payment mediated the relationship between

the experimental manipulation of information and observed recidivism, suggesting that

the experimental manipulation of information led to more payments that, in turn, led

to less recidivism.

Policy Implications

The findings from the prior experiment indicated that offenders who had received

information about the economic sanctions they had paid and what they still owed were

more likely to make payments. In that study, scholars concluded that giving offenders

this information was cost-effective, in that for every dollar spent, more than $6in

restitution was received. The results of this follow-up analysis of recidivismdemonstrate

that the cost-effectiveness of providing information is greater than previously indicated.

At a cost of $64.19 per day for jail in Pennsylvania, the difference of 46.4 days between

offenders who received information and those in the other experimental conditions could

be as much as $2,978.42 per offender, less the costs of monitoring payments.

Keywords

restitution, economic sanctions, recidivism

Restitution is court-ordered payment by an offender to compensate a crime victim

for direct tangible losses resulting from the crime. In the past two decades, court-

ordered restitution has become more common because of greater criminal justice

efforts to reduce the tangible and psychological costs of criminal victimization as part of a

more general increased concern for crime victims (Haynes, Cares, and Ruback, 2015). Aside

from restoring actual and symbolic justice with victims, restitution also helps offenders

restore justice with society at large (Gladfelter and Ruback, 2017). Less apparent is the

possible benefit of restitution payment for offenders in terms of reducing their likelihood of

committing new offenses. In this study, we investigate whether paying restitution is related

to lower offender recidivism.

Restitution is one of three primary types of economic sanctions. Whereas restitution

is aimed at compensating victims, fines are monetary penalties, and fees are imposed to

reimburse government for the costs of operating the criminal justice system (Ruback and

Bergstrom, 2006). Of these three types of economic sanctions, offenders judge restitution

to be the most fair (Ruback, Hoskins, Cares, and Feldmeyer, 2006). Because of these

different purposes and differences in the way the sanctions are perceived, restitution may

have different effects than fines and fees on recidivism. Assessing this idea requires first a

look at the link between recidivism and economic sanctions in general and then a look at

the link between recidivism and restitution in particular.

790 Criminology & Public Policy