Corey Whichard, Heather Grob, Paige Wanner, Nathan Adams

The Reentry Community Services Program (RCSP) provides support services for adults leaving prison who have complex mental illness and who pose a danger to themselves or others. Individuals are eligible to receive up to 60 months of mental health services and housing assistance.

In this second and final report, we describe our findings that RCSP is associated with positive outcomes for participants, as well as positive monetary benefits for participants and others in society. We also find that the monetary costs of RCSP are higher than the expected long-term benefits. We found no evidence for promising features to add to the program that might increase its effectiveness.

We evaluated the RCSP by examining differences in reentry outcomes for a group of program participants and a comparison group of similar non-participants. We found that program participation is associated with improved outcomes, primarily during the first 6-12 months after prison release. During this period, RCSP participants were more likely to experience positive outcomes (e.g., mental health treatment and receipt of financial assistance) and less likely to experience negative outcomes (e.g., recidivism and homeless shelter use).

We conducted a benefit-cost analysis and found that relative to the comparison group, the RCSP returns $0.57 per dollar spent. In other words, the cost of the RCSP exceeds the benefits we can estimate, in part because program success leads to increased state expenditures. We were unable to monetize a reduction in homeless shelter use. We found limited evidence that extension of the RCSP to other populations would result in net monetary benefits to society.

Finally, we explored which components of reentry programs in the research literature are linked to reduced recidivism and could be modified in the current RCSP. Among the analyzed components, only medication assistance, already available in the RCSP, was associated with reductions in recidivism

Olympia: Washington State Institute for Public Policy.2024. 76p.