By: Teddy Grant

In the first season of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black (OITNB), Tasha “Taystee” Jefferson, a Black female prisoner played by Danielle Brooks, was released from prison only to be locked back up a few episodes later after realizing how difficult it was to reacclimate to society after incarceration.

While Taystee is fictional, her story may sound familiar to the thousands of people behind bars who were released but ended up back in prison.

The recidivism, or reconviction, rate in the U.S. is one of the highest in the world. Around 44% of prisoners are rearrested within one year of release, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Within three years, 68% of people are rearrested.

Around 83%, or five in six, state prisoners released in 2005 were arrested at least once within nine years of their release, according to a 2018 recidivism study from the U.S. Department of Justice. Black men fare much worse among all groups, with 87% of them being rearrested within the same time period.

Educational illiteracy, lack of vocational job skills, lack of interpersonal skills or criminal history plays a factor in such high recidivism rates, according to a 2018 report from the Arts and Social Sciences Journal.

Researchers from the University of Connecticut, the University of Iowa and Florida State University found that Black men have higher rates of rearrest compared to other groups, despite having lower risk factors that would lead to ending back up in jail, according to a study in Justice Quarterly from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

Black men are also more likely to participate in rehabilitation programs, according to psychology news site VeryWellMind.

“This suggests that beyond individual risk, other factors, including racism and implicit bias, as well as poverty and employment opportunities in the local community, are driving recidivism,” the study’s co-author Stephanie C. Kennedy, assistant professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Connecticut, told Phys.org.

According to Phys.org, white women’s risk factors for recidivism were the highest due to lower high school graduation rates, employment history, number of offenses, and greater chances of having drug and alcohol problems. Yet, despite the increased risk, their rearrest rates were the lowest of any group.

“In our study, the most potent predictor of recidivism was being a Black male, even though Black men had less contact with the criminal justice system and few of the risk factors traditionally associated with recidivism,” Kennedy said.

The country’s high recidivism rates are unsurprising. The United States has the highest incarceration rates globally, with 2.3 million people in America’s jails, prisons, juvenile detention and immigration detention centers.  More than 1 million of those imprisoned are African -American men.

“Everyone I know is poor, or in jail, or gone,” Taystee said on an episode of OITNB. Her statement perfectly encapsulates some of the barriers the formerly incarcerated face when they’re not behind bars.

A 2004 study on poverty and recidivism among women offenders from Criminology and Public Policy journal showed that poverty was one of the main factors in recidivism.

“The findings show that poverty status increased the odds of rearrest by a factor of 4.6, and it increased the odds of a supervision violation by a factor of 12.7,” according to the study.

Strict probation or parole guidelines, such as extended supervision terms, curfews or drug and alcohol use, can lead to failures to those on probation that can have them reincarcerated.

According to a 2016 probation and parole report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, almost 350,000 people went from supervised release to prison or jail.

Research has shown that the best way to combat recidivism is to create programs that address concerns that recidivists face, such as poverty, lack of access to proper mental health care and rigid parole guidelines.

“We need to look beyond individual-level risk and begin to explore the individual, community, and policy-level factors—including pervasive racism and increased surveillance—that result in reincarceration for people of color, and specifically for Black men,” said Katie Ropes Berry, a doctoral candidate in the School of Social Work at Florida State University, who led the Justice Quarterly study.