RAND Office of Media Relations FOR RELEASE Monday September 8, 2008 Deportable immigrants who previously have been expelled from the United States are more likely to be rearrested on suspicion of committing a crime after they are released from jail than other deportable immigrants without the prior history of expulsion, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Studying deportable immigrants released from the Los Angeles County Jail, researchers found that men who previously had been deported from the country were about twice as likely to be rearrested within a year than other deportable immigrants. Previously deported immigrants also were rearrested sooner and arrested more frequently than other deportable immigrants. The findings provide support for law enforcement programs that target deportable immigrants who have a record of being previously deported from the United States. "Having been deported once before appears to be a good indicator of who may be at risk of committing more crimes in the future," said study author Laura Hickman, an assistant professor with the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute at Portland State University and a researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "Our findings support efforts taken in many jurisdictions to focus scarce law enforcement resources on this group." The study, forthcoming in the journal Crime & Delinquency, is the first to objectively test the notion that those immigrants with a record of being previously deported pose a disproportionate burden on local criminal justice systems. The RAND study tracked 517 deportable immigrant men who were released back