Studies across the nation assess recidivism risk tied to age of  people released from prison

The commutation application asks the applicants to provide reasons for how a commutation would “assist with your rehabilitation and benefit the community.” The applicant is asked to provide a list of programs they participated in while incarcerated, education and certification, and other achievements, along with a re-entry plan detailing such things as employment prospects, where they would obtain housing and other resources.

As part of the process, there will be statements by the judge who sentenced the applicant, along with input from the district attorney who brought the charges, and testimony of victims that will be weighed.

Two factors that data has shown to be critical to predict lower recidivism — older age upon release and longer sentences served prior to release — have been designed into the commutation criteria by requiring applicants to serve at least half of their incarceration or at least 20 years of a life sentence. Requiring them to serve at least half their sentence ensures that when they are eligible to apply, they are older and therefore statistically less likely to re-offend.

In an April 2026 report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum, “Cross Examination: a comprehensive review of the Wisconsin criminal justice system,” data compiled from the Wisconsin Department of Corrections shows that people in prison who are over the age of  40 had a much lower three-year recidivism/reincarceration rate than younger people. Those 60 or older had the lowest rate at 12.3% followed by those 50-59 at 19%. Those who were 40-49 years old had a rate of 25.7%.

The Policy Forum report also  found those who had served a sentence of five or more years were significantly less likely to end up back in prison compared to those who had served less than five years: 18.5% compared to more than 32%.

A 2017 report from the United States Sentencing Commission looking at the effects of aging on recidivism among 25,431 federal offenders released after 2005 noted that  “numerous recidivism studies document well that older offenders are at lower risk for reoffending, and the Commission’s own research has confirmed this finding for federal offender populations.”

One of the commission’s key findings is that “Over an eight-year follow-up period, 13.4% of offenders age 65 or older at the time of release were rearrested compared to 67.6% of offenders younger than age 21 at the time of release.”

A 2022 report by the California parole board notes that of 4,197 persons serving a life sentence in that state released via a parole board ruling between 2011 and  2018 just 2.7% or 114 persons had been charged with a new misdemeanor or felony and only 0.5% were again convicted of a felony against another person.

The California report doesn’t include the average ages of those released via parole or how many years they served prior to release. However, a 2011 study by Stanford Law School, “Life in Limbo,” found that the average age of most people serving a life sentence who were released from prison was 49.9.

When Gov. Evers opened the commutation process via his two executive orders on April 4, he included a special application for juvenile life sentence commutation for those who were convicted of a crime at 19 years of age or younger.

Wisconsin advocates have pushed the state Legislature since 2023 to allow re-sentencing for juveniles who were given a life sentence. A bill introduced in the last legislative session would have allowed resentencing for those who had served at least 20 years of a sentence for a crime involving a death or 15 for crimes that did not involve a death. They pointed to two studies from Pennsylvania involving a large-scale release of juvenile lifers sentenced to life in prison as minors. The studies found that the recidivism rate was very low.

Pennsylvania began a resentencing process for youth lifers in 2017 after the landmark Supreme Court decision in 2012 Miller v. Alabama that ruled mandatory life sentences without parole were unconstitutional for those under age 18, in part, because of brain science that shows youth are still cognitively developing and therefore should not  be held to the same standard as adults. Later, in 2016, the Supreme Court ruled in Montgomery v. Louisiana that the Miller decision applied retroactively, “invalidating all juvenile life-without-parole sentences that had been mandated by statute.”

Most of the juvenile lifers in Pennsylvania — 62% — had been convicted of first degree murder, while 38% had been convicted of second  degree murder. Out of 521 youth lifers in Pennsylvania, 459 were resentenced and 323 became eligible for parole and 230 were released.

Of the 174 who had been released from prison from Philadelphia County the average age at release was 51. As of December 2019, only two had been re-arrested and convicted of a new crime and both were considered “low level.”

The most helpful factors for reintegration, another Pennsylvania study found, were family connectedness, stable housing, employment, support groups, transportation and access to healthcare – similar factors considered in the Wisconsin commutation applications.

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