The Impact of Prison Programming on Recidivism

ABSTRACT

Prison programming is expensive. From 2009-2011, Iowa spent more than $24 million on prison programming with many of those programs directly designed to reduce recidivism. Unfortunately, understanding whether these programs actually reduce recidivism is complicated by prisoners’ ability to select into program participation and completion. This paper uses an innovative method to estimate program impacts. Specifically, the sample is limited to prisoners that either participated in a given program or were eligible but did not participate due to factors beyond their control. Among this sample, nearest neighbor matching is used to evaluate the impact of 16 prison program categories on recidivism. No prison program consistently improved recidivism outcomes in Iowa during the period of analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Reenty
• programming
• recidivism
• prison

Disclosure Statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Acknowledgment

The author thanks Lettie Prell, Beth Skinner, Eric Ohrn, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.

Notes

1. The cause of Iowa’s exemplary recidivism rates are unclear. One possibility is that many potential recidivists are simply moving to other states and committing crimes there. According to Durose, Snyder, and Cooper (2015), 13.3% of individuals released from Iowa prisons were arrested in another state within 3 years. This rate was fifth highest among the 30 states in the sample. Moreover, Iowa continues to use parole widely as opposed to adopting truth-in-sentencing laws. Kuziemko (2012) shows that parole boards are efficient in reducing recidivism rates substantially relative to fixed-sentence regimes.

2. The discretion allowed counselors in program assignment necessarily creates some subjectivity in which prisoners are treated. To the extent that counselors are able to identify those prisoners most likely to be positively affected by a given program, this subjectivity should bias the results toward finding that programming is more effective at reducing recidivism.

3. For a full description of LSI-R scores and their effectiveness at predicting recidivism see Duwe and Rocque (2016).

4. Recent research has documented the varied definitions used for recidivism and how they can dramatically influence results (Rydberg & Grommon, 2016). In this article, recidivism is defined as a prisoner being released from and returning to incarceration within a 3-year period. The reason for returning to incarceration could be either a new crime conviction or a technical violation (e.g., parole violation). Results for total and new crime recidivism are presented separately.

5. All estimation is done in Stata/MP 15 using the ado file developed by Leuven et al. (2015).

6. The sample can also be restricted to LSI-R categories 4 and 5. Results presented in this section are consistent when Category 3 is excluded.

7. Tables available upon request.

8. Participation in either employment services programming or MIVFPP is found to increase technical and new crime recidivism in two of the three specifications considered. Participation in a domestic violence program increases new crime recidivism in two of the three specifications considered.