sodium

This editorial describes a program called the Inner Change Freedom Initiative. This is a "biblically based" and "Christ centered" program where volunteering prisoners that supports prisoners through a "spiritual and moral transformation".

To test the effectiveness of the program, the participants were matched with a control group of similar prisoners who did not participate. This introduces the problem that the control group, not being volunteers, might have been less eager to be rehabilitated, but the control group was chosen with the goal of being similar in nature to the group that actually volunteered, as opposed to just a random sample of prisoners.

Anyway, here's the result from http://www.crrucs.org/8_research_pdf...ge_freedom.pdf
(page 5)

The same report mentions (page 7),

But of course, this is better than the IFI's score. The report justifies this by arguing that what is really important is that the graduates of IFI did better than the non-participants. The report recognizes that this means that the program could be simply selecting people less likely to re-offend. The program actually requires that people get a job after release in order to "graduate". But the report argues that because the difference between graduates and non-participants holds up over time, the selection bias can be discounted.

But if the program was really having a substantial effect (like the 5-10% figure for secular programs), then the participants would tend to do better than the non-participants.

enrious

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...threadid=59712