While criminologists have successfully identified some risks associated with recidivism, the literature has largely been from an urban perspective. The current study aims to address this gap by examining probabilities for recidivism among offenders returning to rural counties. One challenge to prisoner reentry that remains understudied is transportation. Therefore, a further contribution of this study is the recognition of transportation as an obstacle to reentry and in turn, a source of risk for recidivism, especially among rural offenders with little access to public transportation services. Additionally, the current study examines for differences between two types of recidivism: reconviction and technical violation. Utilizing a dataset of 3,296 men released from prison in 1998, this data was combined with new dataset created specifically to capture different measures of rurality at the county level. Results indicate that when compared to offenders returning to urban counties, offenders returning to rural counties are more likely to recidivate, and more quickly, as these individuals experienced shortened times to failure. Furthermore, results indicate large variances in probabilities for recidivism and estimation of time to failure between offenders who fail by reconviction and those who fail by technical violation, warranting further analysis. Finally, access to transportation proved statistically significant across some models, but results were inconsistent for causal inference.
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