Why “Rehabilitating” Repeat Criminal Offenders Often Fails

This report seeks to add much-needed perspective to America’s debate over criminal rehabilitation policies. Crucially, we document what is known and not known about the efficacy of rehabilitation programs in curtailing recidivism. We start by highlighting the psychological challenge of altering criminal behavior. We then review U.S. efforts to develop and deliver rehabilitation programs over the past decade. We show how rhetoric has caused treatments to seem more successful than honest data analysis reveals them to be. Nearly all such programs have either failed or been almost impossible to replicate in clinical trials. We then detail how political narratives have bolstered misleading claims about rehabilitation’s successes and highlight the wasteful investments that have ensued, citing Washington State’s juvenile rehabilitation programs as the embodiment of all these issues. Finally, we propose that policymakers and agency heads first acknowledge how hard it is to change behavior and then make moral and evidence-based decisions about program implementation and investment.