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Nebraska’s Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Program University of Nebraska at Omaha Workplan.

Co-Principal Investigators
Lisa Sample and Cassia Spohn
Department of Criminal Justice

Project Associates
Candice Batton, Dept. of Criminal Justice
Greg DeLone, Dept. of Criminal Justice
Colleen Kadleck, Dept. of Criminal Justice
R.K. Piper, College of Public Affairs and Community Service
Amanda Randall, School of Social Work
Dennis Roncek, Dept. of Criminal Justice

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An inter-disciplinary team of researchers from the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) will work with the Nebraska Department of Corrections to implement and evaluate Nebraska’s Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Program. As explained in detail in the sections that follow, UNO will (1) facilitate/coordinate the implementation of the reentry program and (2) conduct an outcome and a process evaluation of the reentry program.

Faciliation/Coordination of the Implementation Process

The University of Nebraska at Omaha will facilitate the implementation of a pilot offender reentry program in the Omaha area. Members of the research team will hold a series of meetings with state and local criminal justice agents and service providers. The purpose of these meetings is three-fold. First, the meetings will familiarize criminal justice practitioners and service providers with the components and objectives of the reentry program and the components of its evaluation. Second, during the course of these meetings, information will be solicited as to the resources currently committed to offender reintegration and what services are still needed. Lastly, the meetings will foster communication across the several agencies and service providers involved in service delivery so that a coordination of services can be achieved. From the information derived from these meetings, members of the research team will construct a handbook of services, which will contain names of service agencies grouped by area of specialization, their contact information, client eligibility criteria, and any other information relevant for matching offenders’ needs to available services. The handbook will also include general information regarding the needs of reentering offenders, a description of the reentry program, and a discussion of its goals and importance. This handbook should serve as a reference for state planners so the implementation of Omaha’s pilot program can be replicated statewide.

The research team also will ensure that program service components are in place in the community before offenders return, so offenders’ needs can be met as soon as they reenter society. The research team will contact service providers to ensure that they are ready to receive reentering offenders and that they have been well trained to obtain the information needed to conduct the program evaluation. If need be, members of the research team will address any last-minute concerns of service providers with regard to the coordination of service delivery or the compilation of evaluation data.

Evaluation of the Prisoner Reentry Program

The University of Nebraska at Omaha will conduct an outcome evaluation and a process evaluation. The purpose of the outcome evaluation is to determine whether participation in the reentry program improves offender reintegration and reduces offender recidivism, and to identify the conditions under which the program is most likely to accomplish these goals. Additionally, the outcome evaluation will assess the impact of the reentry program on public safety and determine whether the reentry program is cost effective relative to traditional release procedures. The purpose of the process evaluation is to examine the accuracy with which the reentry program identifies and selects the target population; the extent to which the program builds effective partnerships between criminal justice, behavioral health, and social services; and the degree to which the various components of the project are implemented as intended. The process evaluation also will identify problems that occurred during each of the three phases of the project, the source of these problems, and potential solutions.

Outcome Evaluation

Data for the Outcome Evaluation. A variety of techniques will be used to collect quantitative and qualitative information to measure program impact. These techniques include (1) a series of face-to-face interviews with program participants and members of a matched control group; (2) collection of data regarding offenders’ progress from members of the reentry teams, substance abuse treatment providers, social workers, and other relevant service providers; and (3) collection of data from official records. Interviews with program participants and members of the control group will capture data on a variety of psychological, social, and behavioral factors prior to release from the correctional institution and at regular intervals during phase two and phase three of the reentry program. In addition, participants in the reentry program will be asked about their perceptions of the program and their attitudes toward and assessment of the reentry experience. The interview schedule will be a compilation of standardized measures, including the risk assessment instrument that will be used to identify the target population and items/scales created by research staff. Members of the reentry team and other service providers involved in the project will provide regular updates on offenders’ progress and will monitor compliance with the terms of the Personalized Reentry Program Plan. Official records maintained by criminal justice agencies and substance abuse treatment providers will be used to collect data on offender recidivism, drug tests and progress in substance abuse treatment programs.

Analysis of Reoffending. The overriding goal of the reentry program is to prevent reoffending by offenders released from correctional institutions. Thus, the first objective of the outcome evaluation is to determine whether the reentry program is more effective than traditional release procedures in preventing reoffending and to identify the correlates of participants’ success or failure. We will compare outcomes for program participants and a matched control group, using multiple measures of relapse/recidivism and a variety of analytical techniques. Our dependent variables will include the following:

• whether defendant tested positive for illegal drugs (yes/no); if yes, type of drug(s);
• number of positive drug tests;
• length of time (in days) to first positive drug test;
• whether the defendant was cited for a technical violation (yes/no); if yes, the type of violation;
• number of technical violations;
• length of time (in days) to first technical violation;
• whether defendant arrested for a misdemeanor (yes/no);
• number of new misdemeanor arrests;
• whether defendant arrested for a felony (yes/no);
• number of new felony arrests;
• whether defendant arrested for a felony drug offense (yes/no);
• whether defendant arrested for a violent felony (yes/no);
• length of time (in days) to new misdemeanor arrest ;
• length of time (in days) to new felony arrest;
• whether defendant convicted of a misdemeanor (yes/no);
• whether defendant convicted of a felony (yes/no);
• whether defendant sentenced to jail/prison for a new offense (yes/no);
• length of sentence (in days) imposed for new offense.

In order to isolate the effect of participation in the reentry program from other predictors of relapse/recidivism, we will control for the offender’s background characteristics (race/ethnicity, age, gender), prior criminal record, and history of substance abuse. We will control for a number of indicators of the offender’s stakes in conformity: length of residence in the community prior to incarceration for the current offense, current employment status, level of education at time of release, family situation and living arrangements. We also will control for the offender’s assessed level of risk. We will obtain data on offender recidivism/relapse from official records (i.e., arrest records, court records, results of drug tests administered by drug court personnel). Information on offenders’ sociodemographic characteristics and stakes in conformity will be obtained from Department of Corrections’ files and during the pre-test interview with the offender in the institution.

The analytical procedures to compare reoffending rates for program participants and controls will depend upon the nature of the dependent variable. We will use logistic regression to analyze the dichotomous dependent variables and ordinary least squares regression to analyze the interval level variables. Survival analysis will be used to analyze “time to failure”—that is, the number of days until relapse or recidivism. Using these techniques, we will be able to determine whether reentry program participants have significantly lower levels of reoffending than offenders in the control group. We also will be able to determine if program participants recidivate at a slower rate than defendants in the comparison group. Finally, we will be able to identify the factors that predict reoffending among program participants.

Analysis of Reintegration. A second objective of the outcome evaluation is to assess the reentry program’s effect on offenders’ reintegration into the community. That is, the objective is to determine whether participation in the reentry program leads to improvements in participants= physical and mental health, education, employment, family situation, and living arrangements. Interviews will be conducted with offenders assigned to the treatment and control groups. The interview instrument will be a compilation of standardized tools and individual items. The interview schedule will collect the following types of information:

• Demographic Information: sex, age, race/ethnicity, years of education, marital status, insurance status, current living arrangements, employment status, type of job (if any), pre-incarceration employment history, monthly income from employment and government aid.

• Current Family Characteristics: number of children, where the children currently reside, availability/amount of child support, and contact with social services.

• Family Background: family type, family arrest history, family mental health problems, family drug use/alcohol abuse, whether respondent was exposed to parental deviance during childhood and adolescence, whether parents used physical violence (against partner or respondent) during respondent’s childhood

• Criminal Behavior and Involvement with Criminal Justice System: whether respondent ever engaged in a range of crimes and, if so, the age of initiation and the frequency of involvement for each crime; involvement with criminal justice system (whether incarcerated or placed on probation and, if so, the number of times and length of sentence) prior to incarceration for the current offense;

• Drug Use and Drug Treatment: whether respondent ever used a variety of substances (including alcohol, marijuana, hallucinogens, inhalants, cocaine powder, crack cocaine, heroin, PCP, depressants, other narcotics, and methamphetamines), and, if so, routes of administration, age at first use, and frequency of use; whether respondent was ever enrolled in specific treatment and detoxification programs and, if so, the number of times and length of time enrolled in each program, ages at which treatment was received, reasons for entry into and factors that led to attrition from treatment; whether respondent has ever experienced any drug-related problems while using alcohol or drugs.

• Mental Health: whether respondent has ever been diagnosed with a mental health disorder and, if so, what types; (respondents with a mental health disorder) mental health treatment history, including the number of times ever enrolled in specific types of treatment, length of time enrolled in each type of program, ages at which treatment was received, reasons for entry into treatment, and factors that led to attrition from treatment; respondents will be screened for mental health problems such as suicide ideation, depression, and antisocial personality.

• Medical Issues: all respondents will be screened for high-risk behavior related to infectious diseases using the Simple Screening Instrument for Infectious Diseases.

• Program Perceptions: treatment group respondents will be asked about their attitudes toward and assessment of the reentry program experience.

During the interviews, we will use time reference points to assist in the recall of information related to criminal behavior, drug use, and mental health histories. The method of sequencing the interview into time intervals meaningful to the respondent has proven quite successful in collecting retrospective, longitudinal data over long periods of time (Belli 1998; Bradburn et al. 1987; Caspi et al. 1996). The procedure requires that the interviewer work closely with the respondent to structure the period of interest, using corroborative information and memory aids (e.g. life events and associated dates from official records). In this way, criminal behavior patterns and displacement, shifts in the frequency or severity of criminal involvement (lulls, episodes, relapses after lengthy desistance periods) and contributing situational factors (peer group roles, legal or social sanctions, and life events such as the birth of a child or loss of a job) can be temporally anchored over a multiyear period to establish the natural history of criminal behavior and the factors that have affected its course.

Analysis of Impact on Public Safety. The third objective of the outcome evaluation is to assess the effect of the reentry program on public safety. This will be accomplished by comparing crime rates in the areas to which the offenders will be returning before and after implementation of the reentry program. The project will assess the impact of re-entry on crime for the areas most likely to be affected by re-entering prisoners. The addresses of all reentering prisoners will be geocoded (assigned geographic coordinates) to allow the research staff to examine the concentration of offenders in different areas through computer mapping and to measure the statistical associations between the concentrations of re-entering offenders and crime.

The project will identify the levels and rates of crimes using police incident data for four levels of the surroundings of each offender’s residence for a period of 90 days prior to the re-entry to a specific residence. This time period establishes the necessary statistical baseline to determine trends reliably before reentry occurs. After establishing this baseline, measuring the post-reentry impact on crime can be assessed using such techniques as logistic regression, Poisson regression, Zero-Inflated Poisson regression and Tobit. Examining crime data prior to reentry will also permit assessing the risk of exposure to criminal activity which reentering offenders will face in their residential environments.

The four levels of the residential environment to be examined are: the immediate city block of residence, the census block group containing the residence, the census tract, and the zipcode of residence. Examining crime on the city blocks of residence permits assessing the impact of relocating offenders on the smallest residential environment into which they reenter. Expressive crimes, such as domestic violence and assaults, are crimes which tend to occur in the immediate residential environment. Predatory crimes, such as robbery and burglary, are often committed at small distances away from offender residences to avoid apprehension as a result of being recognized by others. Thus, the project will also examine before and after changes in crime for the three types of areas that are larger than the immediate block of residence but still highly accessible to those re-entering, i.e. census block groups, census tracts, and zipcodes. The levels and rates will then be tracked for the each of these four areas in which each offender resides for either the duration of the project or until an offender leaves a particular residence.

Computerized maps will be prepared to allow visual presentation of crime before and after reentry for the four levels of the accessible residential environment. Other maps will also simultaneously display the concentration of reentered offenders and important demographic and housing conditions in the areas. Finally, the residuals from the statistical models will be mapped to identify the areas in which reentry had both smaller and larger impacts than identified by the statistical models. This mapping will help to identify the areas in which reentry has been more successful than expected and those in which it has been less successful than expected in terms of the impact on public safety.

Cost-Benefit Analysis. The final objective of the outcome evaluation is to conduct a preliminary cost-benefit analysis the reentry program. The Federal Office of Management and Budget recommends cost-benefit analysis as the technique to use in formal economic evaluations of government programs such as drug courts, juvenile diversion programs, and prisoner reentry programs. The standard methodology used in conducting these studies is net present value - - the discounted monetized value of expected net benefits (i.e., benefits minus costs). Net present value is computed by assigning monetary values to benefits and costs, discounting future benefits and costs using an appropriate discount rate, and subtracting the sum total of discounted costs from the sum of the discounted benefits.

We will compile a comprehensive enumeration of the different types of benefits and costs of the reentry program and the traditional methods of releasing offenders to the community. Examples include gross and net earnings of participants, changes in tax revenues attributed to these participants, the value of the work performed by the participants, opportunity costs of foregone earnings for participants, costs related to participation in the program, cost of drug treatment, and the savings resulting from the use of the reentry program versus traditional release. The analysis will include preliminary estimates of the expected benefits to individual participants, to the criminal justice system, and to society. Social net benefits will be the basis for evaluating the reentry program. Both tangible and intangible benefits will be recognized. Costs will reflect the opportunity cost of any resources used, as measured by the return to those resources in their most productive application elsewhere.

Process Evaluation

As noted earlier, the purpose of the process evaluation is to examine the accuracy with which the reentry program identifies and selects the target population; the extent to which the program builds effective partnerships between criminal justice, behavioral health, and social services; and the degree to which the various components of the project are implemented as intended. The process evaluation also will identify problems that occurred during each of the three phases of the project, the source of these problems, and potential solutions.

Successful implementation of the prisoner reentry program will require coordination among a variety of criminal justice and social service agencies. Therefore, an important component of the process evaluation will be determining the degree to which the reentry program facilitates and supports collaborative partnerships between the justice system and these agencies. This level of analysis requires assessing transaction processes among a variety of service organizations in the following ways: intensity of resource flows or the amount and frequency of resource flows among agencies (clients, funds, staff, information); formal/informal linkages or the degree to which rules, policies, procedures govern the relationships among network agencies (e.g., number of service contacts with other organizations); consistency of communication, joint problem identification, and nature of informal working relationship; complexity of linkages or the number of actors/agencies, number of subgroups, nature and content of transactions.

Data for the Process Evaluation. To measure program operation we will (1) review official documents regarding the structure, and operation of the reentry program; (2) conduct interviews with key stakeholders; (3) conduct focus groups with members of the reentry teams; (4) distribute self-administered surveys for program personnel.; and (5) observe reentry team meetings and meetings between reentry teams and the offenders they are supervising.

Program documents will be used to understand the operation of the program and to identify the program’s official goals and objectives. Interviews with key stakeholders will be used to identify the agencies involved in the program, which will provide the necessary “stage” to assess the program’s ability to form effective collaborations with community service providers. This information will then form the basis for self-administered surveys of agency personnel, which will document the amount of collaboration actually occurring across agencies and systems. Focus groups with reentry team members will be used to obtain information on their perceptions of the program’s strengths and weaknesses, obstacles they have faced in implementing the program, and strategies they have used to address those obstacles. Finally, observations of reentry team meetings will be used to collect descriptive data on implementation of the program.

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