Welcome to Balanced Scales, a monthly newsletter sharing high impact summaries of research on criminal justice topics. Do you have a topic you’d like me to cover? Respond to this email and tell me what’s on your mind.

Rooted in Research: Rehabilitation

Key Takeaway: Positive prosocial change (rehabilitation) is possible through the criminal justice system, but only if we prioritize it.

The Findings

• Rehabilitation, or positive behavior change, is one of the key purposes of the criminal justice system. The idea is that after someone serves a sentence, they should be less likely to commit crimes in the future when they are in the community.

• However, research consistently shows that being incarcerated in the US has no effect on crime, and can actually increase an individual’s criminal activity.

• In the US, the use of evidence-based treatment programs is the most successful way to decrease recidivism. The top five program areas are:

  • substance use treatment (as appropriate)

  • correctional education (high school, vocational, and postsecondary)

  • correctional industries

  • cognitive behavior therapy programs

  • and the Risk-Needs-Responsivity approach to community supervision.

• Outside of the US, the most effective correctional systems (like Norway’s) are designed with a strict focus on rehabilitation and minimizing disruption to participants’ lives.

Why It Matters (what’s the bottom line?)

• Better Public Safety: Focusing on rehabilitation will reduce recidivism, which means lower crime rates. Remember that the vast majority of justice-involved people will return to their lives in the community, to their neighborhoods, families, and jobs.

• Financial Impact: It costs more money to run quality programs, but we know effective programs save money in the long run through reduced crime and avoiding the associated system costs of that crime.

• Policy Implication: We need more quality programs in prisons and jails, including CBT, education, and job training. These are the most effective strategies to rehabilitation. We need to continue to fund and maintain effective programs in the community (this includes research and data infrastructure to track effectiveness!).

 Need More?

📄 Full study: This meta-analysis looks at the entire body of scientific evidence we have around the impact of imprisonment on recidivism. The authors note that there are so many high-quality studies that at this point it is unlikely any other study will come out with a different result.

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146.annurev-criminol-030920-112506

Criminal Justice in the News: Rehabilitation and Juvenile Crime

•  Both juvenile imprisonment rates and juvenile crime declined starting in the 2000s. Imprisonment dropped about 75% nationwide, while juvenile arrests have dropped 80%.

• The examples in this news article show that the more a young person is pulled into the criminal justice system and away from their community, the worse off they’ll be.

• This reminded me of the Norway system, where many prisons are open campuses - residents move freely on campus most of the time, and can leave to visit their family while they serve their sentence.

Work in motion: Working with violent offenses

Positive change for justice-involved folks is central to my work. This means tracking real impacts - looking at recidivism of course, but also figuring out whether a program or policy is helping justice-involved people build stability and make helpful changes in their lives.

I’m currently studying a really unique treatment court along with a team from PSU. Normally a violent charge excludes an individual from any opportunity to serve their sentence in the community. But in this case, the participants are all people who’ve pled guilty to a violent crime.

These folks aren’t serial offenders. One of the interesting things we’ve already learned is that for people working in the system (judges, DAs, POs), the participants of this court aren’t a threat to public safety. They are people who made a serious mistake on a really bad day.

The treatment court keeps the stable parts of someone’s life intact while they are provided resources, treatment, and supportive services, and are held accountable by a team to make positive changes in their life.

If the treatment court team can support them while they serve their sentence in the community, it can save the state a lot of money on their current sentence and most likely (based on existing research) will save even more money in reduced recidivism compared to prison sentence.

We’re in the middle of the process evaluation and plan to release the process report in December. Stay tuned!

Thanks so much for reading.

Look for our next newsletter, coming straight to your inbox on the third Thursday of every month. Do you have a topic you’d like me to cover? Would you like me to simplify my topics further? Do you have an unique rehabilitative program I should hear about? Respond to this email and let me know all about it.

Peace,

Ann