California spent $600 million to house and rehab former prisoners — but can’t say whether it helped
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As Gov. Gavin Newsom retools the state’s prison system to emphasize rehabilitation, his administration has little evidence that a privately run program for parolees costing taxpayers $100 million a year works to prevent future crime.
The state does not collect data on whether parolees who participate in the program have found jobs or whether they are returned to prison for another crime. What state data does show is that only 40% of participants completed at least one of the services they were offered.
The information gap frustrates critics of the governor’s policies as well as supporters who want evidence that the state’s investments are working.
“At the end of the day, we’ve come from 160,000 people incarcerated down to 95 (thousand). So we’ve had some success,” said Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a Los Angeles Democrat, referring to the decline in the state’s prison population since 2011.
“But I also want to ensure the public that they’ve been safe with all these people not recidivating… And the only way we can do that is to come up with data,” he said.
CalMatters’ yearlong investigation of the parolee reentry program draws on court records, state reports and data, contracts, tax forms, policy experts, interviews with vendors and communication with several current and former program participants — some of whom are back in prison.
CalMatters found:
- Corrections department data is outdated, inaccurate or doesn’t exist. When the department provided CalMatters with a roster of more than 400 locations providing rehabilitation services, we visited 23 of them, finding some with inaccurate addresses, one with a padlocked gate in front of a seemingly closed site, another that appeared to be abandoned, and three where employees said they were no longer providing rehabilitation services.
- Department officials struggled to explain how many people enrolled in the program in 2020-2021. The department published an annual report noting 17,650 participants. Dana Simas, a department spokesperson at the time, told CalMatters the program served 9,516 people. The department later revised that number to 8,213.
- State data show only two out of five parolees who participated in the rehabilitation program in 2020-2021 completed at least one service offered to them. Based on how the state collects data, it’s unclear if anyone finished all of the services offered to them. A spokesperson said the corrections agency “is unable to provide further completion information.”
- State officials rarely review the operations of the four companies that operate the program, state accountability reviews show. Records show state officials only documented reviews of three of the more than 400 state-funded reentry homes and treatment facilities from 2018 to December 2022.
- Some of the nonprofit vendors that manage reentry homes lease their facilities from their own executives, according to public records, raising “red flags” among experts who say the arrangements could signal financial conflicts of interest.
- The state’s July 2022 list of reentry homes included several with suspended business licenses and nonprofit status revoked years ago by the California Department of Justice — effectively barring them from doing business in California.
The rehabilitation program for parolees formally launched in 2014 under the name Specialized Treatment for Optimized Programming, often referred to as STOP. It is a voluntary program that serves less than a quarter of the roughly 35,000 inmates released from prison each year. Many of the parolees live at the homes; others visit outpatient centers.
The STOP program for parolees, which has cost the state about $600 million in the past decade, is run by four large contractors. Those companies also contract with nearly 200 nonprofits, private companies or community organizations to provide housing and rehabilitation services for parolees in roughly 450 homes and treatment centers.
All of the contractors told CalMatters that they were proud of the work that they do with the program.
“GEO Reentry Services is proud to operate California’s Specialized Treatment for Optimized Programming … on behalf of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,” wrote Monica Hook, GEO’s vice president of communications. “GEO Reentry connects participants in 18 counties with housing, education, and treatment services to support successful reentry and recidivism reduction.”
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