Stricter Community Supervision, More Recidivism? An Ego-Depletion Theory

Can stricter community supervision (i.e., parole and probation) requirements lead to an increase in recidivism? I investigate this question by constructing a law enforcement model in which individuals can incur costs to increase their degree of self-control. The analysis reveals that stricter community supervision can, in fact, increase recidivism if these investments lead to ego-depletion and also increase the effectiveness of investments in reducing the probability of supervision violations. This possibility therefore warrants empirical investigation, and policy makers ought to be mindful of it when determining the strictness of community supervision conditions.
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One important take-away from proposition 1 is that under some intuitive conditions (e.g., where the offender acts as if he suffers ego-depletion and pcr(r; c) < 0) increasing the strictness of supervision conditions can lead to more recidivism. Whether these conditions hold in reality is an empirical question which is difficult to answer. Although there are some empirical studies that analyze the impact of various community supervision strategies, they tend to focus on the sanctions associated with supervision violations rather than the strictness of supervision (e.g., Hawken and Kleiman 2009), and the few articles that study supervision strictness do not focus on establishing a causal relationship between strictness and recidivism (e.g., Grattet and Lin 2016). Establishing this type of causal link is complicated by the fact that an increase in supervision strictness typically increases the probability of detecting recidivism. This makes it difficult to decompose changes in the detected recidivism rate among released individuals into effects due to increases in the detection rate versus effects due changes in the recidivism rate. Therefore, further empirical investigation is needed to determine whether stricter supervision conditions may, in fact, increase recidivism.