I know so many policmakers and practitioners who are desperate for information on which prison programs (if any) are effective. How should facilities use their scarce resources - in terms of staff time and funding? Do existing programs make any difference, in the short term or after release? Traditionally, research in this space has compared inmates who participate in programs (or - worse - complete those programs) with inmates who do not. But it's not random who participates in & completes programs. Those who do were likely encouraged to sign up by case managers, based on their specific needs, or they volunteered based on their motivation to change. Facilities also typically require good behavior in order to participate — this is a way for them to incentivize that good behavior, to keep facilities safer. This is all fine and good, but it means that program participants are different in many ways — most unobservable in the data — that make apples to apples comparisons impossible. If we are comparing motivated, well-behaved people with unmotivated, poorly-behaved people, are we surprised that the former group is less likely to reoffend later? Of course not. We shouldn't attribute differences in future behavior to the program they participated in — but this is what too many researchers do. Enter Steeve Marchand and his colleagues. They are finding and using clever natural experiments to quantify the value-add of various prison programs. I hope others take their methods and apply them in other settings. It's time to get serious about what works in this space, so we can use jail and prison time as the intervention point that it is. Check out my conversation with Steeve for more.

Great article about my new book — The Science of Second Chances — in @voxdotcom. Let's go make some positive change!

Cool job alert: "Postdoctoral Scholar: Criminal Justice Research Center & PA Department of Corrections" This is an opportunity to contribute to the fantastic research program at @CorrectionsPA under @kbucklen. They're doing some of the most innovative, rigorous work in the public safety space. And they're looking for someone with causal inference skills to help them do even more.

The @Arnold_Ventures Criminal Justice team is hosting another *free* causal inference workshop for researchers interested in sharpening their skills. This one will be taught by the amazing @tahamonster the day before ASC (Nov 11 in DC). Interested? Sign up by Sep 7!