Hit and Miss? Ensuring that Prisoner Rehabilitation Programmes Work
A United States study assessing the effectiveness of a reintegration programme for prisoners showed no impact. South Africa should consider assessing prisoner rehabilitation programmes to ensure that public funds are spent wisely.
Chandre
Gould,
Senior
researcher, Crime and Justice Programme, ISS Pretoria
Prisons are
often referred to as ‘universities of crime’ because of the substantial number
of convicts who re-offend after being released. It is for this reason that the South
African Department of Correctional Services (DCS) states that the
rehabilitation of inmates is one of its key priorities. However, whether ‘rehabilitation’
is even possible and if so, how to achieve it, is the subject of much debate
and scholarly work.
A
reintegration programme for prisoners that combines getting them ready to take
up jobs and resist the lure of alcohol and drugs, seeing to their mental health
and providing them with support and services for two years after they leave
prison, sounds like a good idea. And yet, the results from a controlled
experiment aimed at measuring the effectiveness of just such an initiative that
was developed and implemented in the US showed that prisoners in this programme
fared no better, or worse, than those who did not receive the intervention.
Such
interventions can prove expensive and resource intensive. The finding therefore
reinforces the importance of measuring the effectiveness of ‘rehabilitation’
and reintegration programmes for offenders so that we can avoid spending money
and time on those things that don’t work, and focus on those that do.
Professor
Sheldon Zhang shared the findings of a randomised control trial at the ISS’s 3rd
international conference on ‘National and international perspectives on crime
reduction and criminal justice’ at the end of October. The experiment tested
whether those who took part in the programme did better than those who did not.
Did they find and keep jobs more effectively? Were they less likely to be
re-arrested? Were they more successful in finding stable accommodation and
resisting drugs? For each of these criteria the difference between those who
participated in the programme and those who did not was negligible. This raised
the difficult question for those funding and implementing the programme of whether
it was worth offering at all. This is the question that South Africa should
consider in relation to the ‘rehabilitation’ programmes offered to some
offenders in our prisons too.
According
to the most recent 2011/12 budget vote for the DCS, 28 ‘rehabilitation’ programmes
are available to South African prisoners. Prisoners’ access to these programmes
is determined by their sentence plan, which is drawn up by DCS officials after an
assessment has taken place. The programmes offered include inter alia interventions aimed at assisting the participant to
manage anger, address alcohol and drug dependence, address sexual offending and
understand restorative justice, and at providing the skills necessary to cope
with life after prison. Most of these programmes are offered by non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) and faith-based organisations. The availability of these
programmes depends primarily on whether there are organisations that are able
to offer them in the geographical area where the prison is based. There is a
cost both to the state and to the donors that support the relevant NGOs.
The cost to
the DCS is really only the cost of the 75 staff members allocated to the
rehabilitation work of the department. It therefore costs taxpayers some R50,7
million a year (of which 94% is for salaries). While this is a small percentage
of the Department’s total budget of R15,34 billion, it is important to ensure
that it is spent on interventions that can be shown to be effective. It is very
difficult to assess the exact cost to the NGO and donor community, that run most
of the rehabilitation programmes. Since 68% of the cost of the reintegration
programmes offered in correctional services is carried by NGOs, the cost to
donors may amount to as much as an
additional R107 million a year.
Assessing
the effectiveness of these programmes is not only important because we need to
make sure that money is well spent, but also because ineffective programmes
will not prevent repeat offending. Indeed, there is very little evidence to
suggest that anything except the most sophisticated, individually tailored
rehabilitation programmes do in fact reduce recidivism. However, if a proper
study were to find that the programmes being offered in our prisons do in fact
work, then the argument could be made that the DCS and the donor community
should dedicate even more resources to making sure all prisoners have access to
these programmes.
Zhang
offered three good reasons for why randomised control trials are worth the
trouble in assessing the outcomes of such programmes:
- Limited resources for such interventions demand that
there is accountability for programme implementation and the outcomes
- Rigorous evaluation design saves money by avoiding
ineffective programmes and therefore wasteful spending on these intervention
efforts
- Randomised control trials (RCTs) are easy to
implement and can be done without sophisticated statistical analysis being
required
However, Zhang warns that RCTs are inflexible in
that you have to have a control group (people who have not been offered the
service) in order to test whether there is a difference in outcome between
those who have access to the intervention and those who don’t. In other words,
you have to do this kind of study right if the results are to be reliable. As
the state has moved to measuring outcomes to hold departments accountable for
public expenditure, conducting these types of assessments are important to
ensure that resources are directed towards those programmes that are most
effective.
