A New Way to Attack Social Problems: ‘Pay for Performance’ Projects
Los Angeles Times | Opinion
By The Times editorial board
January 21, 2014
The cornerstone of criminal justice reform is the belief that offenders leaving prison could be prevented from committing new crimes and getting locked up all over again, if only government could find the right social service organization to provide the right programming. Crime would drop, some prisons could close and taxpayers would save money. First, though, officials have to identify rehabilitation programs that work, and that means evaluating claims and evidence offered by competing providers, and perhaps making so many wrong choices before landing on the right one that the effort hardly seems worth it. Even elected officials and high-ranking bureaucrats who believe in criminal justice reform are skittish about trying something new, so they often give in to their colleagues who prefer costly and unsuccessful but comfortably familiar policies on sentencing, imprisonment and parole.
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