The Impact of Prison Programming on Recidivism

Prison programming is expensive. From 2009-2011, Iowa spent more than $24 million on prison programming with many of those programs directly designed to reduce recidivism. Unfortunately, understanding whether these programs actually reduce recidivism is complicated by prisoners’ ability to select into program participation and completion. This paper uses an innovative method to estimate program impacts. Specifically, the sample is limited to prisoners that either participated in a given program or were eligible but did not participate due to factors beyond their control. Among this sample, nearest neighbor matching is used to evaluate the impact of 16 prison program categories on recidivism. No prison program consistently improved recidivism outcomes in Iowa during the period of analysis.