Recidivism Redux

I’ve written about this before, but this is a good time to revisit the issue.  From today’s NYT: 1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Foun:

An unreleased Pentagon report provides new details concluding that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.

Is that a high number?  Here is a point of comparison from the DoJ.  I’ll quote at length:

• Rearrest within 3 years
• 67.5% of prisoners released in 1994 were rearrested within 3 years, an increase over the 62.5% found for those released in 1983
• The rearrest rate for property offenders, drug offenders, and public-order offenders increased significantly from 1983 to 1994. During that time, the rearrest rate increased:

- from 68.1% to 73.8% for property offenders

- from 50.4% to 66.7% for drug offenders

- from 54.6% to 62.2% for public-order offenders

• The rearrest rate for violent offenders remained relatively stable (59.6% in 1983 compared to 61.7% in 1994).

• Reconviction within 3 years
• Overall, reconviction rates did not change significantly from 1983 to 1994. Among, prisoners released in 1983, 46.8% were reconvicted within 3 years compared to 46.9% among those released in 1994. From 1983 to 1994, reconviction rates remained stable for released:

- violent offenders (41.9% and 39.9%, respectively)

- property offenders (53.0% and 53.4%)

- public-order offenders (41.5% and 42.0%)

• Among drug offenders, the rate of reconviction increased significantly, going from 35.3% in 1983 to 47.0% in 1994.

• Returned to prison within 3 years
• The 1994 recidivism study estimated that within 3 years, 51.8% of prisoners released during the year were back in prison either because of a new crime for which they received another prison sentence, or because of a technical violation of their parole. This rate was not calculated in the 1983 study.

So… thus far, at least, released terrorist suspects are much less likely than “regular” prison inmates to return to a “life of crime.”  There are a few possible implications of that, some good, and some bad:

(1) Maybe Gitmo is actual a model of rehabilitation.

(2) Maybe terrorists are less committed to their cause than petty criminals are to breaking the law.

or

(3) Maybe, and frankly, this strikes me as the most likely… the vast majority of the people we’ve released from Gitmo were never terrorists in the first place.

In any case, the idea that we can only release people from Gitmo if we can somehow guarantee that NONE of them ever return to the fight is absurd.  It is an impossible and unrealistic standard.  Trying to implement it would lead inevitably to permanent detention without trial of anyone caught up in our counter-terror programs.

We need to grow up and realize that unfortunately this is not an ideal world.  We can’t achieve perfect security.  There are tradeoffs in any approach.  But holding people forever, without any transparent process for assessing their crimes is both a threat to democracy and such a disaster for our image in the world that we will pay the consequences tenfold for trying to achieve the unachievable.

Update (5/22): Of course, another possibility is that these guys didn’t “return” to terrorism, but rather than some innocent people became terrorists due to our mistreatment.  After all, if we had solid evidence that they were terrorists initially, they would not have been among those released.  We likely released people we realized were innocent, and it seems possible we managed to turn 14% of the innocents swept into Gitmo into terrorists.

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