The Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit focused on “over-criminalization,” declares that “non-criminal (or ‘technical’) violations are the main reason for incarceration of people on probation and parole.”

Other advocacy groups, like the Council of State Governments and the Vera Institute, agree.

This sounds bad: Technical parole violations include things like missing an appointment with one’s parole agent, violating a curfew or skipping a treatment session.

Shouldn’t prison cells be reserved not for insignificant rule infringements, but for real crimes?

In fact, they are.

A nationwide survey of state prisoners from 1979 to 2016 found that people incarcerated for TPVs alone made up only about 12.5% of the prison population.

And as our own and others’ research finds, many of these TPVs are preceded by real crimes, often leading to arrests.

We studied all TPV cases of reincarceration of parolees in Pennsylvania for a period of 22 months, from Jan. 1, 2024, to Oct. 31, 2025.

Of the 9,517 parolees sent back to prison during this period, 58.8% (5,596) were returned for a TPV.

But it turns out that 18.7% of those, or 1,047 parolees, had also been arrested for a new offense.

In other words, nearly one in five of the reincarcerated technical violators had been arrested while free on parole during the period just prior to their reincarceration — more than 10% of them for violent crimes.

In fact, one in five is an undercount: For a significant number of these reimprisoned parolees, their technical-violation charges indicate they’d committed crimes such as assault or illegal drug possession.

For instance, one standard parole violation charge in Pennsylvania is labeled “assaultive behavior”; another is labeled “positive urinalysis/use of drugs” — indicators of illegal acts.

When we added these violators to the count, we found that more than one in three technical violators appear to have committed a criminal offense while under supervision and just prior to their return to prison.

Then there are the absconders — parolees returned to prison for not reporting to their agent (as required) for an extended period.

Absconding can signal that the individual under supervision is attempting to evade detection or apprehension for new criminal behavior.

Add them to the mix, and nearly half of technical violators who are returned to prison either showed criminal behavior or were on the run before being returned.

If they committed a crime, though, why are these individuals re-imprisoned for a technical violation?

Why not charge a crime and seek a conviction?

The candid answer: It’s faster, easier and more likely to pay off for prosecutors to send someone back to prison through a parole-violation hearing rather than through the courts.

A parole hearing is held before representatives of the parole board, without any need to seat a jury — and the standard of proof is lower (“preponderance of the evidence,” not “beyond a reasonable doubt”).

Is this unfair to the parolee, a lack of due process?

No, because in more than 90% of cases, formal criminal charges and parole-violation accusations play out the same way: with a plea of guilty in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Our Pennsylvania study is not the only one to find that technical violations are commonly accompanied by crimes.

A federal study of 2021 cases by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts found that 34% of supervised release revocations (the feds don’t call it “parole”) for technical reasons also involved arrests for new crimes.

The study concluded that “revocations for technical violations had relatively negligible impacts on federal prison populations.”

Then there’s a California study, examining cases from 2003 and 2004.

Using this study’s results, we calculated that 43% of the parole-board decisions to return the parolee to prison involved a combination of technical violations (mostly absconding) and criminal violations.

Anecdotal evidence we’ve heard from other states further suggests that Pennsylvania is not an outlier.

In short, technical parole violations are not just technical; parolees are re-imprisoned because of additional crimes that the TPV tag masks.

Moreover, they commonly engage in many more technical violations than parolees who are not revoked and reincarcerated.

The federal study of 2021’s cases found that revocation cases averaged 10 violations of release requirements, while cases that did not result in revocation averaged six.   

Moreover, the system is reluctant to reincarcerate technical violators: Most receive written warnings, treatment and all sorts of less-serious sanctions before being recommitted for a technical violation.

Parolees rarely go back to prison on their first TPV. 

The problem is not unwarranted incarcerations for trivial reasons, as the anti-imprisonment advocates claim.

The problem is recidivism.

Barry Latzer is an emeritus professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Kristofer Bret Bucklen is director of the Bureau of Planning, Research & Statistics of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. Adapted from City Journal.