The Limits of Recidivism: Measuring Success After Prison

Other reentry and rehabilitation approaches, such as reentry courts, swift-certain-fair supervision (Cullen, Pratt, and Turanovic, 2017; Lattimore et al., 2016), and comprehensive approaches, such as programs funded by the Second Chance Act, have shown limited impacts on post-release outcomes, including substance-use relapse, rearrest, or reincarceration (Bitney et al., 2017; D’Amico and Kim, 2016; Lindquist, Willison, and Lattimore, 2021). A common result in reentry program evaluations is that individuals do receive more services, but reentry outcomes do not improve. However, historically, the evaluation literature on correctional programming has been tied to the inadequate measures of repeated contact with the criminal legal system that were discussed in Chapter 2. Rare are the studies that have linked program evaluations for justice-involved individuals to broader measures of desistance and reintegration (Wright et al., 2021; Hawks et al., 2021).