In a move expected to produce much greater understanding of the criminals filtering through Montgomery County’s jail system, county higher-ups will soon make a concerted effort to study repeat offenders.
Despite being a national leader in the corrections industry, the county has never specificallytried to pinpoint the level to which past inmates are re-offending, known as recidivism, largely because jail administrators use other means to track the success of the re-entry program, they told The Examiner on Tuesday.
Based on a directive from County Council members, though, that soon will change.
Montgomery County Director of Corrections and Rehabilitation Arthur Wallenstein, and Stefan LoBuglio, chief of the department’s Pre-Release and Re-entry Services Division, will appear before the council’s Public Safety Committee later this week to start to figure out how they will calculate the county’s recidivism rate.
By next month they will have to agree upon a concrete approach and timeline for the study.
“This is really about trying to get a handle on what works,” Wallenstein told The Examiner. “We want to see what we might measure so we can seek to improve the work we do for reentry.”
A major part of the challenge is crafting an appropriate definition. Some agencies only count rearrests in their jurisdiction for their recidivism statistics, while others factor in technical violations or parole violations.
And constantly updating whatever formula is decided upon strains the time and resources of corrections staffs.
For these reasons, it’s still rare for counties to have recidivism rates on hand, LoBuglio said.
Maryland, as a whole, does track recidivism, with the latest information showing that 49 percent of the 22,500-person inmate population will be convicted of new crimes within three years of release, according to the state’s Department of Public Safety and Corrections.
At this point all that’s known about Montgomery County’s upcoming recidivism analysis is that it will focus on the re-entry program, which accounts for 200 of the 570 sentenced prisoners in the county.
Justice Maryland Executive Director Kim Havensaid she’s eager to see how Montgomery County decides to keep track of the rate of re-offending criminals.
“That will be a great tool in being able to see if there are gaps of service,” she said.
