Results: Youthful Offender Males

Table 12 presents the base recidivism rates for youthful offender males using the reoffense measure generated from the SAS© life-test procedure with follow-up periods of six months to thirty-six months. These data show that, in the six month follow-up, the private youthful offender males have lower recidivism re-offense rates than their public counterparts. In the intermediate periods of twelve to eighteen months follow-up, the re-offense rates of public and private youthful offender adult male inmates exhibit no meaningful differences in that none of the differences exceed 2%. In contrast, for the longer follow-up period of thirty-six months, public youthful offender male inmates have higher re-offense rates within all of six groups, ranging from 4.6% higher in the B1 group to 8.7% for the A2 group. However, none of these base re-offense rate differences are statistically significant at the p<.05 level.

Table 13 presents the base recidivism rates for youthful offender males using the reimprisonment recidivism measure. These data show that, in the short term through an eighteen months follow-up period, the re-imprisonment rates of private youthful offender male inmates have slightly lower rates than the public youthful offender males, ranging from 0.4% in the A2 group to 2.5% in the C1 group. The greatest difference in the pubic and private prison reimprisonment rates for the longer term twenty-four month follow-up period was 6.0% in the C1 group with private prisons having lower recidivism rates (14.6% versus 20.6%). However, none of the differences in re-imprisonment rates between the public and private prisons were statistically significant at the p<.05 level.

Table 14 displays descriptive statistics of the private and public youthful offender male inmates on the variables used in the final survival models to address the issue of whether recidivism rates differ across the two groups. In terms of the demographic characteristics of age at release, race, and ethnicity, as well as the number of prior recidivism events, the public and private youthful offender male inmates are virtually the same. However, youthful offender males from private prisons are less to be low custody at release (52.3% versus 59.3%, p<.01), spend less time in prison (average = 16.6 versus 18.6 months, p<.01), have slightly lower TABE scores (median = 7.0 versus 7.8), and are less likely to have post-prison supervision (27.8% versus 39.1%). These characteristics are associated with higher recidivism rates. In contrast, public youthful offender males have much more disciplinary problems in prison their private counterparts (average = 2.9 versus 1.8, p<.01), which is also predictive of higher rates.

Table 15 displays the results of the multivariate survival models for the youthful offender males which control several variables known to influence recidivism rates. None of the reoffense or re-imprisonment rate differences between public and private youthful offender male inmates within each of the six methods of quantifying the type of prison experience were statistically significant at the p<.05 level.