College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item An Outcome Evaluation of the Brunswick Correctional Center Sex Offender Residential Treatment (SORT) Program(2007-12-05) Perez, Deanna Maria; Wellford, Charles F; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There is much disagreement among clinicians, politicians, the general public, and researchers about how best to manage sex offenders. Many states have taken punitive approaches, enacting sex-offender registration and civil commitment statutes. Mental health professionals discourage these strategies and call for more treatment. The Virginia Department of Corrections (DOC) provided prison-based, cognitive-behavioral treatment within a relapse prevention framework to incarcerated sex offenders through the Sex Offender Residential Treatment (SORT) program. The purpose of the current study was to examine the effectiveness of this program to reduce recidivism. Specifically, the study assessed whether participation in SORT (both treatment as assigned and treatment completion) reduced the likelihood of re-offending after release from incarceration. In addition, the study aimed to distinguish whether treatment had differential effects for two types of sex offenders - rapists and child molesters. This study compared a group of 97 male inmates who received sex offender treatment through DOC to a comparison group of 64 inmates who did not receive treatment. All subjects were released from prison during the period February 2001 through April 2004. The evaluation utilized existing data maintained by DOC. From this database, a variety of predictors of sex offender recidivism were measured, including the Static-99 to account for between-group differences in recidivism risk. Official reports of any new arrests and probation violations for a minimum of a 12-month follow-up period were used to measure recidivism. There was no indication that sex offender treatment decreased the probability of recidivism. Specifically, treatment participants had a greater prevalence of re-arrests for sex offenses, non-sex offenses, and a composite measure for any new offense, and a lower prevalence of probation violations, than controls. In the multivariate equations, treatment significantly reduced the likelihood of being violated on supervision during the follow-up period but this was only applicable to child molesters. Treatment completion did not substantially alter these findings. Rapists were significantly less likely to re-offend sexually than child molesters, whereas they were significantly more likely than child molesters to be re-arrested for a new non-sex crime. Several aspects related to the type of inmates sampled, the institutional program itself, and the community supervision component were discussed as potential explanations for the null finding that sex offender treatment was generally ineffective at reducing recidivism. This research suggested there are substantial differences in the criminogenic needs and responsivity of rapists and child molesters; however, current treatment for sex offenders was developed primarily for the latter and is inadequate to treat and manage primary rapists. Limitations of the research were discussed, including the small sample size and the short follow-up period. It was noted that correctional administrators should incorporate an evaluation design into the planning phase of treatment programs so that the processes of program implementation and operation can be monitored rigorously and appropriate data can be gathered consistently to establish program efficacy. Additionally, data on dynamic risk factors and community supervision processes should be collected to obtain a more accurate account of recidivism and the factors associated with these outcomes.Item THE IMPACT OF ENTERPRISE ZONES ON RESIDENT EMPLOYMENT: AN EVALUATION OF THE ENTERPRISE ZONE PROGRAMS OF CALIFORNIA AND FLORIDA(2004-08-04) Elvery, Joel A; Hellerstein, Judith K; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation estimates the impact of two geographically targeted economic development programs on the employment of people living in the targeted areas. This question is difficult to address for a number of reasons. Unlike in most program evaluation problems, the process that determines the outcome of interest (resident employment) happens at a lower level of aggregation than the process that determines selection for treatment. Therefore, standard program evaluation techniques have to be modified to address this issue. The programs I study, the enterprise zone programs of California and Florida, were designated at a very detailed level of geography, making it hard to measure the location and the characteristics of the zones. I develop a methodology to address the unusual selection process of these programs. The first step of the methodology is to create a neighborhood-level measure of the component of residents' employment probabilities explained by the neighborhood that is conditional on the characteristics of area residents. To do this, I estimate the component of employment probability correlated with residential neighborhoods, which I call tracts' conditional employment probabilities. The next step is to estimate the effect of enterprise zones on resident employment by comparing the conditional employment probabilities of neighborhoods containing enterprise zones with those of comparable areas. I do this with tract-level propensity score matching. I also carefully measure the location and attributes of enterprise zones. I find that a substantial portion of the variation across neighborhoods in employment rates can be explained by controlling for the attributes of residents. This indicates that it is important to control for resident characteristics when making cross-neighborhood comparisons. Using propensity score matching, I find a large pool of non-zone tracts that are observationally similar to tracts containing enterprise zones. I use these non-zone tracts to create an estimate of what the conditional employment probabilities in zone tracts would have been in the absence of the programs. Even though I focus on two very targeted and generous enterprise zone programs, I find no evidence that the programs impacted the employment of zone residents.