"The First Step Act underscores the significance of Bureau of Prisons (BOP) programming as a strategy to reduce recidivism, offering sentence-reduction incentives for eligible inmates participating in evidence-based recidivism reduction programs. This memorandum reviews existing research on the effects of prison programming at federal, state, and local levels to evaluate its evidence-based status. Three review strategies can establish evidentiary criteria for determining 'what works' in prison programming (Byrne and Luigio, 2009).
The most rigorous review strategy focuses on high-quality, well-designed randomized control trials (RCTs), requiring at least two RCTs with positive outcomes and supporting lower-level studies to deem a program effective. A second strategy identifies programs as evidence-based if at least two quasi-experimental studies show positive results, supported by similar findings from lower-quality studies. This approach is used by the Campbell Collaborative. A third review method, employed by the DOJ's CrimeSolutions.gov, rates a program as effective if at least one high-quality evaluation—either an RCT or a well-designed quasi-experiment—demonstrates effectiveness, based on ratings by two independent reviewers.
This memorandum adopts the second review strategy to summarize the research under review (see Appendix B) and also examines all relevant studies and reviews of prison programs identified by CrimeSolutions.gov."