New York’s prison population has declined 23% to 55,000 prisoners in 2013 after hitting a peak of 72,000 prisoners in 1999.  The decline accelerated after the repeal of the Rockefeller Drug laws in 2009, and has occurred simultaneously with a 20% drop in Index I crimes. Despite this decline in prison population, more than 35,000 individuals were sentenced to New York state prison for the first time between 2009 and 2012. The goal of this study is to better understand the criminal justice involvement of these individuals prior to their first incarceration, in other words we want to describe their pathways to prison.

We start by estimating semi-annual trajectories of arrest for the 10 years preceding their incarceration for those inmates 25 years of age or older at their first incarceration using a group based trajectory model.  To our knowledge, using a sample with a common characteristic at the end of the observation period as opposed to the beginning is a novel application of group based trajectory modeling. We then used the posterior probabilities to create individual trajectories for each inmate.  Our results generate several interesting findings:

-          Fully one quarter of the population has very limited involvement in the criminal justice system prior to their first incarceration.  Not surprisingly, many of these individuals have very serious commitment crimes including murder and rape, crimes that are more likely to result in a prison sentence regardless of criminal history.   

-          On the other end of the spectrum, 10% of the sample had an average probability of arrest over 40% in every six month period for the entire 10 year period prior to the first incarceration.  This means that these individuals averaged over 8 arrests over period of observation, and it was not unusual to find individuals with more than 20 arrests.

-          Among those with frequent arrests, we found that the most frequent sanction was jail time, most commonly reflected in a sanction of “time served.”  Very few of these individuals were ever supervised in the community, and instead appeared to be cycling in and out of jail. Moreover, these “high flyers” appear to be more likely to be classified as mentally ill during intake for their first prison term.

While this latter finding suggests that more intensive community supervision might divert people from prison, it is important to note that these high flyers are potentially a highly select group of people who managed to slip through the cracks of a system that either imprisoned or otherwise diverted most other high fliers.  Therefore, we have also conducted a hazard analysis of prison entry for all those individuals who were arrested between 1999 and 2002 (10 years prior to our spell of first time admissions).  This is essentially the cohort from which our group of high fliers emerged.  The analysis allows us to place the subgroup of high fliers into a broader context.