Recidivism Reduction Research

Since 2009, more than 840 Second Chance Act grant awards have been made to government and nonprofit agencies, and taxpayers have paid nearly 700 million dollars in Second Chance grants. Additionally, $154 million has been spent on probation and parole supervision agencies and staff through the Justice Reinvestment Initiative. Yet, our probation and parole population continue growing! Given the amount of money taxpayers have invested in programs, it seems nothing works. In the 20th century, it was assumed that the use of randomized and control-group research designs and complex statistical analysis and state-of-the-art computer software would be sufficient to find what “works.” But, we have not yet found what “works.” This chapter asks two questions: 1) Is it the case that “nothing works”? or 2) Is it the case that our research methods can't measure what “works”?