RESEARCH AND COMMENT
By David Riley, Director of Corrections' Psychological Services
A "get tough" approach to crime, coupled with a climate of pessimism over offender rehabilitation contributed to a burgeoning prison population in the United States. Pressure on prison numbers has been particularly acute in California with more than 160,000 prisoners and more than 110,000 former inmates on parole - approximately 18 per cent of the total US parole population.
California responded by setting up a small scale, experimental multi-faceted parole-based reintegration programmes during the early to mid-1990s - an approach centred on the provision of services involving substance abuse treatment, literacy training, employment readiness training, and job placement assistance. Encouraging results led to a large-scale expansion of the programme with an evaluation report1 now available.
Although there are many published reports attesting to the efficiency of well-structured approaches to offender rehabilitation, many of these are evaluations of small scale pilot programmes typically carried out under the best of possible circumstances. There is ample evidence that rolling out such programmes more generally is challenging, and there is the potential for loss of therapeutic integrity and resultant failure to emulate the positive results obtained in pilot settings.
By contrast, the evaluation of California's Preventing Parole Crime Programme deals with the delivery of services in "real world" settings. The programme supported skill development in the areas of employment, literacy and numeracy, and housing.
The evaluation sought to answer three questions; to what extent did the programme as a whole reduce recidivism and re-incarceration; to what extent did each of the individual programmes reduce recidivism; and to what extent did duration and quality of participation deliver positive results.
Follow-up of participants in the programme found overall, their recidivism rates were 8 per cent lower than non-participants, and increasing levels of immersion in the programme were associated with lower rates of return to prison. Also, programme participants who met at least one treatment goal had a recidivism rate 20 per cent less than those who did not participate in the programme, and the small number who met more than one treatment goal had a re-incarceration rate almost half that of parolees who did not participate in the programmes.
Almost 60 per cent of those participating in the programme failed to achieve at least one treatment goal during their parole period, and follow-up revealed that their recidivism rate was the same as for the state-wide, non-programme parole population. This finding seemed to suggest that the majority of any positive effects were concentrated on those parolees who received at least one full "dose" of services.
Although all programmes offered under the umbrella of this general approach appeared to have an impact on re-incarceration, the lowest rates of re-incarceration were observed for those who attended one of six residential multi-service centres which, in addition to supporting housing needs, also offered remedial education, assistance with employment, and help with developing communication and problem solving skills. Programmes in the mid-range of effectiveness were the substance abuse network, the literacy programme, and two employment programmes. Whilst still of some benefit, the least gains were found for those parolees who completed a substance abuse education programme.
One final aspect of the analysis looked at the length of time parolees stayed in the programme, and in general, the longer a person was in the programme the less likely they were to recidivate. For each programme, early dropouts had the highest return to prison rate, followed by those who partially achieved treatment goals and finally, those who met the treatment goals in that order.1
1. Zhang S., Robert., and Callanan V. (2006), Preventing parolees from returning to prison through community-based reintegration. Crime & Delinquency, 52,
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ISSN 1178-8453