Analyst advises careful selection of reform efforts.

Byline: Bill Bishop The Register-Guard

One of the nation's leading criminal justice research analysts told state and local corrections officials in Eugene on Tuesday to "question everything" about their reform efforts.

So much research on what works to reform criminals is so poorly done that it is outright misleading, said David Farabee, a research psychologist at the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs who studies the ways that researchers assess reform program effectiveness.

"We have drastically overstated most of our efforts to rehabilitate our offenders," he said.

The understanding of treatment and how it works to change long-term criminal behavior is a fledgling field of study, he said. Using approaches supported by poor research is counterproductive.

Farabee said one study tracked a group of offenders arrested and "treated" in the 1980s and compared them with a similar group of offenders in the 1990s. The results showed that the offenders from the 1980s were arrested fewer times in the three years after their treatment than their counterparts in the 1990s.

Farabee's advice resonates around the state and across the nation, where 2.2 million people are in jail or prison and 650,000 of them are released annually.

In Lane County, corrections programs are bare bones under shrinking budgets.

"We're seeing a systematic starvation of programs all around the state. It's terribly important that we make decisions based on the best evidence," said Chief Deputy Lane County District Attorney Alex Gardner, whose office co-sponsored Tuesday's seminar with the state district attorneys association.

Dozens of corrections agency officials, state legislators, defense lawyers, rehabilitation program managers and corrections planners attended the seminar.

In Oregon, lawmakers have mandated that local corrections officials ensure 75 percent of their programs are "evidence-based" by 2009.

At the same time, public opinion polls show a swing toward rehabilitation and away from hard prison time as the preferred approach for dealing with crime.

While research offers no pat answers for what works to reform criminals, it shows that swiftness and certainty in the system's response to offenders are key characteristics.

Reform approaches that lack consequences for offenders who fail do not work, Farabee noted.

One example of the public's good intentions gone bad is Proposition 36, the 2001 voter-initiated law in California requiring treatment instead of punishment for drug offenders.

The law funnels all offenders into treatment, overcrowding programs with people who don't need it and lowering the quality of treatment for those who do, said Angela Hawken, an economist who spent three years analyzing the effects of Proposition 36.

Under the law, offenders who fail drug treatment face no consequences other than more drug treatment, she said. As a group, drug offenders in California today are more likely to commit new crimes than similar offenders before the law took effect, she said.

"Interview a lot of offenders and they'll tell you it's a joke," Hawken told Tuesday's gathering.

"The stick has to go with the carrot for this to work."

By contrast, Hawaii is testing an approach that combines drug treatment with supervision that guarantees swift, certain and consistent two-day jail terms for those who fail drug tests.

Early randomized studies with valid control groups show dramatic reductions in crime among participants in the Hawaii Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) program, compared to similar offenders who are not in the program, Hawken said.

The Hawaii model is encouraging, but could not be implemented locally without increased taxes to reopen Lane County Jail beds that are closed due to budget cuts, said John Clague, a former jail manager and current chairman of the local Public Safety Coordinating Council, a state-mandated advisory group.

"I see some real opportunities if we are able to focus on that funding issue," Clague said.

"The swiftness and certainty of response - we're failing miserably on that."