How to Prevent Prisoner Re-entry Programs From Failing: Insights From Evidence-Based Corrections

AT ONE POINT in our history, nobody would have imagined releasing a prison inmate into society with little supervision or support. As Simon (1993) shows, well into the 1950s, such a practice would have been unthinkable. From the implementation of parole as a widespread correctional policy, a key component of release from prison was securing employment. It was assumed that offenders would be "disciplined"—kept under control—by the supervision and structured life inherent in holding a steady job. If no job could be found, then parole was seldom an option. This model of "industrial parole," however, became increasingly suspect due to three interrelated developments. First, as the United States moved into a post-industrial economy, the availability of steady employment for those at society's bottom reaches—the stratum from which inmates are disproportionately drawn—gradually deteriorated. In Simon's view (1993, p. 65), there was a "decoupling of the labor market for lowskilled labor from the economy as a whole." Second, the growth of minority populations in prisons—again, a group most hard-hit by economic distress—further undermined the notion that all offenders could secure a job upon return to society. Third, the seven-fold overall rise in state and federal prison populations in the three decades after 1970 created a surplus population of tens of thousands of offenders that prisons could no longer afford to keep locked up, but who had dim prospects for employment. In "post-industrial parole," the control or discipline over offenders thus shifted from a meaningful reintegration into the community to "supervision" by parole officers. This supervision has varied from a clinical model emphasizing rehabilitation to a policing model emphasizing deterrence. But in either case, parole had largely forfeited its former role of working with offenders to allow them to assume meaningful roles in the community upon their re-entry (Simon, 1993). Recently, however, there has been a growing recognition that it is irresponsible to simply release tens of thousands of inmates from prison and to place them into parole officer caseloads that are too high to allow for meaningful intervention and re-entry. In a way, this has been corrections' "dirty little secret"—a practice that simply is indefensible from a public policy standpoint. Beyond lack of resources, there is no way to justify the unsystematic dumping of offenders back into society, since it jeopardizes both the successful reintegration of offenders and the protection of public safety. Fortunately, reacting to this public policy debacle is a movement to identify strategies to guide prisoner re-entry. In this article, we attempt to add our voice to this conversation. Although many persuasive ideas are being put forward and promising programs implemented, we are concerned that insufficient attention is being given to an important development in corrections: the increasing knowledge about "what works" to change offender conduct, knowledge that is based on the "principles of effective correctional intervention" (Cullen & Gendreau, 2000). Informed by this perspective, we attempt to outline how this knowledge base can help inform current attempts to design and implement efficacious re-entry programs. We also caution that a failure to heed evidence-based correctional practice is likely to result in re-entry programs that do not reach their full potential and, perhaps, simply do not work (MacKenzie, 2000; Latessa, Cullen, & Gendreau, 2002).