The 2018 First Step Act (FSA) was designed to reduce reoffending among people leaving federal prisons. Some 44,673 people were released from federal prison facilities under the FSA from 2020 to January 2024.
The think tank Council on Criminal Justice estimated their recidivism rates compared with those released before the law who had similar risk profiles and were tracked for similar time periods. Defining recidivism as any rearrest or return to federal prison for a new crime or technical violation of supervision, the recidivism rate for all people released under FSA is 9.7%.2 While that is considerably lower than the 44.8% recidivism rate for all people released from BOP facilities in 2019, people released under FSA differ in important ways from all persons released, such as their assessed risk level and the length of time they were out of prison.
The analysis shows that people released before the FSA who were at similar risk of reoffending and had similar amounts of time in the community had an estimated recidivism rate of 21.5%. This means the recidivism rate for people released under the FSA is roughly 55% lower than similarly situated people released prior to the FSA. The analysis also found lower rates of recidivism among people released under the FSA within each of the four risk levels as assessed by BOP's risk assessment tool. It is possible to estimate the total number of arrests (for new crime or technical violations) by people released under the FSA and by similarly situated people released from federal prisons before the law. With a recidivism rate of 9.7%, the 44,673 people released under FSA over four years could have accounted for between 5,651 and 7,097 arrests years. With an estimated recidivism rate of 21.5%, an equal number of similarly situated people released prior to the FSA could have accounted for between 9,589 and 11,934 arrests over four years. Taken together, these estimates suggest that people released under the FSA could have accounted for between 3,938 and 4,837 fewer arrests when compared to similarly situated people released from federal prisons before the FSA.
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