NIJ's Evaluation of the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative

NIJ has funded five long-term evaluations and four short-term studies since 2003 to expand knowledge and improve reentry initiatives and policies. The largest ongoing study is a multisite evaluation of the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) (SVORI evaluation).

SVORI is a collaborative Federal effort to improve reentry outcomes along the following dimensions: (1) Criminal Justice, (2) Employment, (3) Education, (4) Health, and (5) Housing.

Sixty-nine sites have received a total of more than $100 million to develop or expand programs that offer integrated supervision and services to offenders. The objective of SVORI is to promote productive social roles for released offenders, and to reduce the likelihood of their return to crime and imprisonment. The initiative requires a multiagency strategy for successfully moving prisoners from correctional control to the community.

To assess SVORI's overall effectiveness, NIJ awarded a grant to Research Triangle Institute International (RTI) and its subcontractor, the Urban Institute, to conduct an evaluation of SVORI across 69 grantee sites. The evaluation includes an implementation assessment in all 69 sites, an impact evaluation in approximately 15 sites, and an economic analysis. The initial project period (May 1, 2003, to April 30, 2004) was the first phase of the project and was devoted to developing and implementing the evaluation design. NIJ awarded a grant for Phase 2 that began on June 1, 2004, and will conclude in May 2008. Phase 2 is devoted to conducting the implementation assessment, impact evaluation, and economic analysis, and reporting the results of the analyses.

Research questions are designed to determine the extent to which—

• SVORI leads to more coordinated planning and integrated services among partner agencies.
• Reentry participants receive more individualized and comprehensive services than comparison subjects.
• Reentry participants demonstrate better outcomes than comparison subjects.
• The benefits derived from reentry programs outweigh the costs.

Evaluators are collecting administrative data from community service providers and criminal justice agencies, interviewing offenders after they are released, interviewing key program and agency representatives, and visiting sites. They are collecting data on employment, housing, family contact and stability, community involvement, health, mental health, substance abuse, recidivism, supervision compliance and technical violations, reoffending, rearrest, reconviction, and reincarceration. Evaluators are looking at neighborhood, work, family, peer relationships, education, military experience, and attitude domains.

As of February 2006, the SVORI evaluation Web site includes an interactive program search Exit Notice that allows visitors to conduct limited searches and run reports on data from the survey of SVORI Program Directors.

Emerging Findings

• Participants in the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative are more likely to receive services than comparable nonparticipants (Lindquist, Brumbaugh, and Winterfield, 2006).
• Most Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative programs are serving small numbers of offenders (53 percent expect to serve fewer than 100 participants per year) (Lindquist, Brumbaugh, and Winterfield, 2006).