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The Daily Signal
Evaluation
Shows Yet Another Government Program Fails to Produce Results
David Muhlhausen
August 25, 2015
The Department of Labor has released the results of its two-year
evaluation of the federal program Reintegration of Ex-Offenders (RExO),
designed to help ex-offenders find employment and reduce recidivism.
The evaluation provides evidence that the RExO grants are ineffective.
While disappointing, the results are not surprising: Failure is the
norm for federal social programs.
The program began as a combined initiative of the U.S. Departments of
Labor and Justice and other federal agencies in 2005. It provides
grants to local organizations to administer employment-focused prisoner
re-entry programs.
The rigorous multi-site experimental evaluation, recently finished,
assessed the effectiveness of federal grants to 24 local
employment-based re-entry programs.
Almost 4,700 former prisoners were randomly assigned to program and
control groups.
While members of the program group were more likely to receive
employment and mentoring services than their counterparts in the
control group, these services had only a slight effect on employment
and earnings, while having no impact on criminal justice outcomes.
The services provided by the RExO grantees had a slight effect on the
employment and earnings of participants. One year after random
assignment, the program group had a 3.5-percent higher rate of working
at all during the year, compared to their counterparts in the control
group.
However, during the following year, the rates of participation in work
by the program group were not different from those of the control group.
For total days employed over the two-year period, the program group did
not work more days than their counterparts. On average, however, the
program group earned $883 more in income than the control group over
the two-year period.
Using administrative data, the services provided by the RExO grantees
failed to improve upon the recidivism, convictions, and reincarceration
rates of participants. Over the two-year follow-up period, 42.0 percent
and 43.2 percent of the program and control groups were arrested,
respectively—a statistically indistinguishable difference of 1.2
percent.
Further, the services provided by the RExO grantees failed to have an
impact on convictions for new crimes, including violent, property, and
drug crimes. Members of the program group were no more or less likely
to be admitted to prison for new crimes or parole/probation violations.
Members of both groups averaged 76 days incarcerated during the
two-year period. The evaluation authors conclude that the criminal
justice results based on administrative data provide “no evidence
whatsoever of any impacts of RExO.”
The results of this scientifically rigorous evaluation have important
ramifications for advocates of federal involvement in prisoner re-entry
programs and congressional attempts to pass versions of the Second
Chance Reauthorization Act in the Senate (S. 1513) and the House of
Represenatives (H.R. 3406), which would fund programs similar to those
of RExO grantees.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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