ABSTRACT
Introduction Although research is a vital part of the scholarly enterprise, one of the problems with
research is that we can often find a study to support just about anything. For example, if
we believed every study about what food is bad for us, we would not eat anything; we
would just drink a lot of red wine. The problem is that there are often studies that have
conflicting findings, and as a result we often do not know what to believe. People often
ask, “Do halfway houses reduce recidivism?” “Do prison programs work?” “Do programs
for sex offenders work?” and so on. One thing we have learned over the years of studying
correctional programs is that there are halfway houses and prison programs that reduce
recidivism and some that do not. The same is true for sex offender programs, as well as
many of the different types of rehabilitation programs that we operate for offenders. As
you also learned, who we place in the program and what the program targets play a major
role in reducing recidivism. The third part of this equation is the “how” we target these
factors. As it turns out, some approaches are more effective than others. In this chapter,
we explore the approaches that are most effective in reducing recidivism.
