Prison Employment
Observations
Education and employment programs do not significantly affect offender recidivism. We have to stop being so simplistic when it comes to treatment programs for offenders.
Author
Leonard Adam Sipes, Jr.
Retired federal senior spokesperson. Thirty-five years of award-winning public relations for national and state criminal justice agencies. Interviewed multiple times by every national news outlet. Former Senior Specialist for Crime Prevention for the Department of Justice’s clearinghouse. Former Director of Information Services, National Crime Prevention Council. Former Adjunct Associate Professor of criminology and public affairs-University of Maryland, University College. Former advisor to presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. Certificate of Advanced Study-Johns Hopkins University.
Article
There are two recent and significant studies from the National Institute of Justice and the President’s The Council of Economic Advisers. The first addressed the results of the Second Chance Act which provides resources to assist people coming out prison. The second conducted a literature review as to the most promising programs to assist former inmates.
A synopsis of the Second Chance Act evaluation as it pertains to employment is offered below.
In both documents, employment and education programs were examined and found to have almost no impact on offender recidivism.
This finding is counter-intuitive for almost everyone. “Employment lowers recidivism,” has been the clarion call for just about everyone in the field.
As to educational programs, from The President’s The Council of Economic Advisers, “Educational programs, while common, have shown inconclusive results and require better-designed studies to adequately evaluate expected outcomes, Crime in America.
The Council continues with recommendations that we should focus on mental health and substance abuse programs as our best hope as to assisting offenders.
Do significant gains in employment mean less recidivism? The Second Chance Act evaluation states that, “Being in the program group increased earnings. In each of those same quarters, those in the program group earned, on average, $780 to $1,000 more than those in the control group. This represents a boost in earnings of between 64 percent and 83 percent. The differences are statistically significant in both quarters.”
Yet there was no impact on recidivism.
Should We End Programs?
Heavens no. The grand tradition of “corrections” is to correct. Offer programs on humanitarian grounds, just don’t mislead the public that a GED and a plumbing certificate will make the world a safer place. Programs make prisons saner, more manageable places. If you have ever spent time in a correctional facility, that’s a very important issue.
But concurrently, we need to acknowledge that programs for offenders are woefully underfunded. Governors are insisting that correctional budgets be reduced and if effective, treatment programs would offer both enhanced public safety and a reduced monetary impact. But funding is inadequate because most believe that they are ineffective.
What About the Rand Study?
Search “Rand and Prison Education” and you will see an endless array of nicely done videos and materials supporting prison education programs.
“Inmates who participate in any kind of educational program behind bars—from remedial math to vocational auto shop to college-level courses—are up to 43 percent less likely to reoffend and return to prison, the study found. They also appear to be far more likely to find a job after their release, and the social stability that comes with it. Every dollar invested in correctional education, RAND concluded, saves nearly five in reincarceration costs over three years.”
But the problem is that most of the studies on educational programs are, at best, inconclusive.
Advocates are disingenuous in the extreme when they insist that education programs reduce recidivism by 43 percent; it’s simply not true. “Inmates who participate in correctional education programs had a 43 percent lower odds of recidivating (emphasis added) than those who did not. This translates to a reduction in the risk of recidivating of 13 percentage points as to reincarceration,” Rand.
Thus Rand’s documentation of a thirteen percent reduction in recidivism is in line with the assertion that treatment programs either show no impact, or a very small effect.
Per Rand, the vast majority of “educated” offenders will recidivate. “When applying these estimated odds to the most recently reported national rates of reincarceration (43.3 percent within three years of release), correctional education would reduce reincarceration rates by 12.9 percentage points on average, although effectiveness does appear to differ by program,” Rand.
In any other field, an 87 percent failure rate would be considered a national disgrace.
Conclusion
We have always reached for the simplistic and familiar when designing programs for offenders. Military boot camps straightened us out in our youth thus boot camps for offenders will also work. They don’t.
When we are in crisis, we seek professional help. Surely offenders would also benefit via cognitive behavioral therapy. In the case of the Second Chance Act participants, there was no difference in recidivism.
Our approach to assisting offenders hasn’t made a difference. It’s gotten to the point where offender rehabilitation programs either do not work, or they do not work very well with less than a ten percent difference in recidivism, Crime in America.
Offenders, especially those receiving prison terms, have horrific histories of child abuse and neglect, sexual abuse (especially for female offenders), brain injuries, massive exposure to violence in the home and community and significant histories of PTSD. Mental illness medicated through substance abuse is a daily occurrence for most people caught up in the criminal justice system, Crime in America.
Some consider offenders the equivalent of the walking wounded.
Recidivism is massive. Five out of six released prisoners are rearrested with an average of five arrests, Crime in America. New data from the US Sentencing Commission suggest an average of six convictions for those in federal prisons, Crime in America. Data for state prisoners indicate that most have conviction histories and multiple convictions are common.
Offenders, especially those released from prison, carry massive problems that are not going to be amended by employment or educational programs. The President’s The Council of Economic Advisers is probably right, the best hope we have is to address mental health and substance abuse issues and even there, they suggest that the vast majority of offenders are still going to fail.
This site has repeatedly stated that offender rehabilitation and treatment programs are failing. We need a national conference and an initiative similar to cancer to resolve it. Left unchecked, funding will dwindle and incarceration will be our only recourse.
Second Chance Act Results and Employment (edited for readability)
The Second Chance Act (SCA), signed into law in 2008 with widespread bipartisan support, authorizes grants to government agencies and nonprofit organizations to reduce the recidivism of individuals being released from prisons and jails. Thus far, the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) has awarded hundreds of grants under various categories of competition to state, local and tribal governments to develop or enhance re‐entry programs serving adults. This report describes the impacts of programs developed by seven agencies that were awarded grants through the first round of funding.
Program case management was a key service. Case management was a key feature of all the grantees’ programs except one. Across grantees, the goal of case management was to help prevent recidivism by providing individualized support and coordinating access to services based on identified needs and risk factors. These case managers were either probation or parole officers (POs) who commonly had reduced caseloads and extra training provided through the grant, or came from social services agencies and had more traditional case management backgrounds (e.g., social workers, counselors). In the latter case, participants might also have been required to report to a parole officer after release, but this individual was not the SCA case manager.
Grantees provided other services, either directly or through referral. The grantees offered education and training, employment assistance, substance abuse treatment, mental health services, cognitive behavioral therapy, prosocial services, housing assistance and supportive services. The grantees provided some of these services directly. Other services were provided by partners, either on a fee‐for‐service basis or through unfunded referrals.
Recidivism
In the 30 months following random assignment, those in the program group were no less likely to be re‐arrested, reconvicted or re‐incarcerated; their time to re‐arrest or re‐incarceration was no shorter; and they did not have fewer total days incarcerated (including time in both prisons and jails). They had a slightly greater total number of re‐arrests and reconvictions, possibly because enhanced case management might have increased the likelihood of catching new offenses.
Nearly 60 percent of those in both groups were re‐arrested, and approximately 45 percent were reconvicted.
- Approximately 60 percent were re‐incarcerated; most of these were jail incarcerations.
- Excluding the time between the RA date and initial release, study participants spent approximately 140 days incarcerated.
- The program group showed a larger number of re‐arrests and reconvictions. The effect is small, but statistically significant.
- There were, at best, modest subgroup differences. Generally, being assigned to the program group did not reduce recidivism for any of the subgroups we examined. The one subgroup difference is that being in the program group may have increased involvement with the criminal justice system for those who were younger, but not for those who were older
Employment
Those in the program group had better longer‐term employment and earnings. In the second year after random assignment, the SCA program group reported consistently higher employment rates and, towards the end of the observation period, earned 83 percent more than the control group
- Being in the program group increased employment. Those in the program group were more likely to be employed in the seventh and eighth quarters after RA (covering approximately 22 to 27 months after RA). The difference is statistically significant in the seventh quarter.
- Being in the program group increased earnings. In each of those same quarters, those in the program group earned, on average, $780 to $1,000 more than those in the control group. This represents a boost in earnings of between 64 percent and 83 percent. The differences are statistically significant in both quarters.
- There were modest differences across subgroups. Assignment to the program group had larger effects on employment and earnings for those who were randomly assigned well before release from incarceration.
Reasons Employment Didn’t Work
One explanation might be that the effects on employment and earnings were not large enough to translate into reductions in recidivism. Another explanation might be that, because of the stigma that comes from their prior criminal involvement, weak employment histories, lower levels of education, and other characteristics that made them hard to employ, the jobs that the formerly incarcerated obtained might generally have been for undesirable work. If so, it could suggest that work itself may not be as important in improving desistance as the types of jobs held. This conclusion would be consistent with Apel and Horney’s (2017) finding that work that provides meaning has a strong effect on desistance, but not jobs generally, even those that pay well.
These reasons might also explain why programs that aim to reduce recidivism by providing employment assistance have shown, at best, mixed results. For example, in their meta‐ analyses, Drake et al. (2009) concluded that employment programs have small but statistically significant impacts on reducing recidivism, but MacKenzie (2008) and Visher and colleagues (2005) concluded that there are no such effects. Recent large‐scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have similarly produced mixed results. For example, a study of the Center for Employment Opportunity, a transitional jobs program in New York City, found small effects on recidivism (Redcross et al. 2012), but a larger study of a transitional jobs program in four sites found no such effects (Jacobs 2012). A recent rigorous study of DOL’s Re‐integration of Ex‐ Offenders program, which provided job readiness training and job placement assistance, similarly found modest effects on improving employment but no effects on reducing recidivism (Wiegand et al. 2015).
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