A program aimed at reducing recidivism among young people jailed on Rikers Island is being shut down because of disappointing results. It’s being hailed as a success anyway because it showed that government, philanthropy, research organizations and direct-service agencies can collaborate in policy experiments.
But while looking narrowly at one policy makes for valid research, it may not give public officials the elbow in the ribs they need to make common-sense changes to how they approach criminal justice.
The Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience or ABLE program, launched in 2012, was the country’s first “social impact bond” project. Social impact bonds use money from private funders to pay for public policy interventions. If the policy produces results, the government pays the funder back with a profit. If it falls short, the investor eats the cost. It’s a way of funding policy experiments without risking government money: Taxpayers only pay if the idea works.
In the case of ABLE, the investor was Goldman Sachs, which put up $7.2 million, $6 million of it covered by Bloomberg Philanthropies. MDRC oversaw implementation of the program, the Osborne Association actually implemented it and the Vera Institute measured the results. The program involved the use of moral reconation therapy (MRT), a form of cognitive behavioral therapy that, according to Vera, “focuses on improving social skills, personal responsibility, and decision making.”
About 87 percent of the 1,691 16- to 18-year-olds who passed through Rikers during 2013 had at least one MRT session and 44 percent of those received an amount of therapy that’s been associated with positive results elsewhere.
But the recidivism rate, which the Osborne Association says is about 50 percent for that age group, didn’t budge. So it was announced last week that the program is being discontinued.
In some ways, the project did exactly what it was supposed to do: It permitted an experiment at no cost to the public. And carrying out such an effort on Rikers, where security lockdowns are common and stays of uncertain and varying duration are the norm, can’t have been easy—especially during a period when, as we now know, conditions on the island were deteriorating.
The question is whether the experiment framed the policy issue properly. Is the main driver of youth recidivism a lack of social skills, a deficiency of personal responsibility or an epidemic of poor decision-making? Those are certainly factors in many youth arrests. But is someone picked up in a trespassing sweep in a friend’s building displaying a lack of responsibility? Is a youth who’s homeless really able to make decisions that keep him out of the criminal justice system? Those are precisely the doubts that underlay the whole critique of the mass-arrest strategy employed under Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly, which was in place for much of the ABLE trial.
The ABLE program did compare the performance of its test group to historical data on 16- to 18-year olds in the system as well as to the experience of 19-year-old jail contemporaries to try to control for the influence of different policing policies. So the results are valid—moral reconation therapy didn’t make a difference.
The bigger issue is whether, given the goal of reducing recidivism, MRT was a better option than, say, reducing the number of questionable misdemeanor arrests or making access to bail easier (90 percent of the adolescents on Rikers are pretrial detainees). Those moves wouldn’t have permitted a policy test like the one ABLE offered and they would have required a deeper strategic shift by city government, but they may have made a bigger difference in the young lives in play.
“I think the test was promising in that everybody adhered to the terms and conditions. The bank did lose money. Nevertheless, it wants to try more of these. It looks promising for the future of trying these programs,” says David Butler, a senior policy adviser at MDRC. “That still leaves the call of what you do to try to improve the outcomes for this population. That remains an open question.”
To be sure, many individual young people doubtless benefited from ABLE. There are more social impact bond projects underway across the country. And there has been real progress in New York of late in reducing arrests, exploring ways to improve mental-health services in jail and reforming bail—experiments of a different sort that are long overdue. As Osborne noted in its statement reacting to the end of the social impact bond project: “ABLE will conclude on August 31, but the kids on Rikers and those who will be detained there in the future need and deserve opportunities and tools to create a positive and productive future.”
2 thoughts on “Did Rikers Policy Experiment Look at the Right Policies?”
So-called “Evidence Based” programs don’t work to reduce recidivism in the offender population.
They don’t work because, based on the evidence that statistical data show, the offender will do what the data predicts he will do and the programs are designed to change the offender by changing the circumstances indicated by the data.
Changing those circumstances doesn’t change the thinking, feeling or intentions of a criminal offender.
Crimes are committed by offenders who choose to commit crimes, not caused by external circumstances.
http://WWW.REENTRY-REINTEGRATION.COM provides common sense programming and solutions to recidivism by influencing the thinking of offenders to encourage cognitive self change to happen.
Criminal offenders have to change their thinking in order to change their behavior.
External interventions will never be effective with this population.
It all boils down to the fact that criminogenic values are controlling the behaviors of criminal offenders.
If an offender begins to accept community values and responsibility for his behaviors, he can change and successfully re enter the community.
Statistical Evidence
Statistics offer a mathematical probability that, based on past experience, something will occur in the future.
Statistical evidence indicating future behaviors of criminal offenders based on factors that contributed to their past behavior, are used to plan for the reentry of prisoners.
This approach to preventing recidivism is referred to as “Evidence Based” or “Risk Assessment” theory.
Currently, widespread use of such an approach is the LSI/R method, which determines the severity of a number of social and psychological factors in an offender’s profile and matches those indicators with a ‘Level of Service’ for remediation.
The LSI is the Level of Service Indicator.
This is the ‘Evidence Based’ origin of a variety of programs to meet the challenges of returning criminal offenders.
They place the responsibility for criminal behavior on circumstances, deficiencies and other external factors.
Law enforcement and correctional professionals know that the causes of criminal behavior originate with the criminal offender.
The common denominator of all criminal offenders is choice.
They choose to commit crimes.
From the subway pickpocket to Bernie Madoff, criminal activity is what they choose to do.
The other common denominator is unconcern for the effects of their actions on other people; a total disregard for humanity or caring for people other than themselves.
Values that civil people share are the glue of a community and of society itself.
Values set the limits and boundaries for everyone’s behavior, and they carry with them a responsibility that criminal offenders will not accept.
The resort that communities have is expulsion, in the form of jail or prison, to protect themselves from predators.
Eventually though, they all come back, and if they return unchanged from the mindset and the criminogenic thinking they had when they were expelled, their behaviors will not change.
A change in their values might mean they will reintegrate to the community.
The Values Re-Entry Program is the opportunity for such change through a step by step process of cognitive self change, motivated by a visceral desire for a better life.
The problem is internal to the offender’s thinking and values.
The solution has to come from internal processes that change the values of the offender and motivate him to accept and share the values of his neighbors.
The Values Re-Entry Statistical Evidence
Statistics offer a mathematical probability that, based on past experience, something will occur in the future.
Statistical evidence indicating future behaviors of criminal offenders based on factors that contributed to their past behavior, are used to plan for the reentry of prisoners.
This approach to preventing recidivism is referred to as “Evidence Based” or “Risk Assessment” theory.
Currently, widespread use of such an approach is the LSI/R method, which determines the severity of a number of social and psychological factors in an offender’s profile and matches those indicators with a ‘Level of Service’ for remediation.
The LSI is the Level of Service Indicator.
This is the ‘Evidence Based’ origin of a variety of programs to meet the challenges of returning criminal offenders.
They place the responsibility for criminal behavior on circumstances, deficiencies and other external factors.
Law enforcement and correctional professionals know that the causes of criminal behavior originate with the criminal offender.
The common denominator of all criminal offenders is choice.
They choose to commit crimes.
From the subway pickpocket to Bernie Madoff, criminal activity is what they choose to do.
The other common denominator is unconcern for the effects of their actions on other people; a total disregard for humanity or caring for people other than themselves.
Values that civil people share are the glue of a community and of society itself.
Values set the limits and boundaries for everyone’s behavior, and they carry with them a responsibility that criminal offenders will not accept.
The resort that communities have is expulsion, in the form of jail or prison, to protect themselves from predators.
Eventually though, they all come back, and if they return unchanged from the mindset and the criminogenic thinking they had when they were expelled, their behaviors will not change.
A change in their values might mean they will reintegrate to the community.
The Values Re-Entry Program is the opportunity for such change through a step by step process of cognitive self change, motivated by a visceral desire for a better life.
The problem is internal to the offender’s thinking and values.
The solution has to come from internal processes that change the values of the offender and motivate him to accept and share the values of his neighbors.
The Values Re-Entry Program.
http://WWW.REENTRY-REINTEGRATION.COM