Vocational and Educational Programs: Impacts on Recidivism

This paper looks at the relationship between educational and vocational program participation and recidivism. Using a cohort of individuals released from state prison in 1994 across five states and tracked for three years, this paper takes into consideration both re-arrest and re-confinement. It finds that vocational programs in particular have significant reductions in both re-arrest and re-confinement; results are primarily driven by programs in Illinois and New York. This paper builds off the extensive literature on the topic by accounting for varying levels of program completion, including different types of recidivism, controlling for state-to-state variation, and looking at both education and vocation programs. In addition to predicting recidivism based on program participation, this study seeks to control for motivation of people choosing to participate in educational and vocational programs using instrumental variable analysis and looks at time until recidivism using proportional hazard models.