Desmond Alvarado spent 18-and-a-half years between state and federal prison, convicted of several violent crimes. Between those sentences, he said, he was once arrested and held for 72 hours in a murder investigation before being released without charges.
Utah lawmakers are considering whether to expand Utah’s current recidivism metric, which tracks individuals who return to prison on new convictions within three years. Recidivism is when a convicted criminal reoffends. The change pitched in HB48 is to also include arrests and jail time, like what happened with Alvarado’s catch-and-release, in the metric.
That’s raising concerns that innocent people could inflate the numbers and tell an inaccurate story about Utah’s crime rate.
Alvarado is now the co-founder of Day Won, a nonprofit that helps incarcerated and recently released people reintegrate into society. He was 16 when he was sent to adult prison. According to him, the real difficulty for people getting out is assimilating back into society. Since his release, he has done social work with those freshly out of the penitentiary. He’s seen some people he works with go back into the system on technical violations for reasons he deems petty.
“A lot of them that I was dealing with was missed appointments,” he said. “And … these missed appointments — only because I know these individuals — they don't even have a driver's license, so for them to get transportation and stuff like that, and not knowing how to catch a bus.”
A lot of people in Utah who go to prison return after they’ve been released. In fiscal year 2025, 59% of prison admissions were because of parole violations. New convictions accounted for 23% of those admissions, according to Department of Corrections data.
Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill argues the recidivism rate points to problems with the parole process rather than a surge in new crime, though he said he’s seen it used to fuel a high-crime narrative. He agrees with Alvarado that barriers such as finding work and reliable transportation set up newly paroled individuals to struggle.
Gill said “data is great,” but added that his concern lies with how it is used. He fears that if statistics on arrests or jail time are used, they will inflate numbers and be used to support a political agenda.
“It is not lost on me that both at a national level and even at some local levels, not just our state, sometimes that crime narrative becomes part of a political agenda and to castigate a particular group or particular class of individuals,” he said.
Better and more detailed data could help lawmakers and judges make smarter decisions, but Gill is skeptical the Legislature will use it responsibly.
Pam Vickrey is a defense attorney and executive director of Utah Juvenile Defender Attorneys. Her concerns mirror Gill’s.
“I think the collection of the data about arrests and jail time, and things like that are very, very important,” she said, “but using that as a data point that then can be convoluted or mixed in with recidivism is concerning to me.”
An arrest doesn’t say anything about recidivism, Vickrey said, because of the broad array of reasons someone could be arrested and the different outcomes possible.
Utah has long embraced a tough-on-crime approach. Over the past five years, lawmakers have passed 165 bills increasing criminal penalties compared with 34 that reduced them, according to an analysis by the Utah Defense Attorneys Association. The figures do not include the 2026 legislative session.
HB34, which is sponsored by Republican Rep. Karianne Lisonbee, adds to that trend. It has also drawn attention for creating a pathway to adult prison for 17-year-olds convicted of aggravated murder if they are 18 at sentencing and a judge approves the transfer.
Lisonbee rejects the notion that expanding data collection will impact Utah’s current measurement for recidivism.
“We're not actually including it as part of the data set that would go into our recidivism number as a state, because we want to be more comparable to other states,” she said, saying that the extra numbers will be used in an alternative recidivism metric just for legislators to better inform future criminal justice policy.
District Attorney Gill still frets that the data has the potential to be misconstrued.
“So that's the slippery slope, but as long as we are open-eyed and honest about why we're gathering this data, then we can try to keep all of us accountable to those expectations, rather than create opportunities for misuse of that same data,” he said.
Lisonbee’s bill is out of committee and now heads to the Senate floor for debate and a final vote.
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
