New Report: Why Rehabilitating Repeat Criminal Offenders Often Fails

NEW YORK, NY — For over a century, policymakers and researchers have tried to rehabilitate criminal offenders. Despite these efforts, recidivism rates remain stubbornly high. Social science research consistently shows that serious criminal behavior persists across time, circumstances, and locations.

In a new Manhattan Institute report, Texas State University associate professor Matt Logan, University of Cincinnati professor John Paul Wright and Manhattan Institute director and fellow Hannah E. Meyers challenge optimistic claims about rehabilitation programs. After analyzing a decade of U.S. rehabilitation efforts, the authors find that political rhetoric has driven faulty, agenda-driven research efforts, ultimately exaggerating these programs’ success. In reality, most have failed or proved nearly impossible to replicate in rigorous clinical trials.

While some programs help certain individuals in specific situations, the authors urge policymakers and agency leaders to acknowledge the difficulty of changing behavior and to base their decisions about program implementation and investment on evidence. They recommend:

• Testing programs rigorously—Avoid adopting rehabilitation programs until blinded, randomized controlled trials that include sufficient sample sizes have been conducted, including at least three years of follow-up data.
• Defining success upfront—Require program evaluators and scholars to a priori establish concrete, readily quantifiable working definitions of rehabilitation and their effectiveness, success, and failure.
• Prioritizing local solutions—Favor locally tailored programs with a strong independent evidence base over programs implemented statewide with less evidence of scalable success.
• Keeping public safety first—Endorse treatment programs that retain public safety as a primary goal, and recognize that rehabilitation advocates often have competing, ideologically driven, aims.

Click here to read the full report.