A Systematic Review of Criminal Justice Interventions for Adults

Background and Purpose: Each year, approximately 13 million individuals cycle between incarceration and the community, representing a substantial social problem for the social work profession.  When formerly incarcerated individuals do return to the community, they face many obstacles that increase the likelihood for reincarceration.  Overall, the rate of reincarceration is high and has remained unchanged for over 20 years.  Despite the demonstrated needs of formerly incarcerated individuals, research shows that programming is only available for a limited few, and when programming is available, the overall quality is low.  Informed by this, the current study aimed to compile the best available interventions to reduce reincarceration and address the revolving door of imprisonment.  Thus, a systematic review was conducted to identify those interventions tested with criminal justice involved adults in a randomized controlled trial.

Methods:  The systematic review was structured to identify all articles written in English and published between January 2000 and October 2015 within the databases of EBSCOhost, Web of Science, and PubMed.  A series of search hedges were constructed for a criminal justice population, program or intervention, and randomized controlled trial.  These three search hedges were then combined together and sequentially paired with a search hedge for seven broad service areas, including: mental health, substance use, tangible life skills, cognitive skills, relational skills, job readiness, and transitional employment.  For each service area search, a pair of researchers completed a three-step process.  First, a review of all article titles to screen-in those reporting on a criminal justice population and a randomized controlled trial.  Second, a review of the screened-in article abstracts to ensure that outcomes related to criminal justice behavior or the seven service areas were described.  Third, the researchers compared their independent results from the previous two steps and computed Cohen’s kappa to measure inter-rater agreement.

Results: The initial search across the seven service areas yielded 3,789 articles.  Following a review of every article title within step one, 256 articles were identified for a thorough review of the article abstract.  An independent assessment of the article abstracts narrowed the final sample of articles to 84, and the Cohen’s kappa was .708 indicating fair agreement between the reviewers.   Interventions in the areas of mental health and substance abuse for justice-involved adults were identified at a substantially higher rate than interventions targeting job readiness, relational skills, or life skills.  Overall, there continues to be a need to test the effectiveness of interventions for justice-involved adults within randomized controlled trials.     

Conclusions and Implications: A grand challenge for the social work profession is to develop an evidence-based strategy to reduce incarceration.  This study contributes an important first step towards developing a strategy for smart decarceration by identifying those interventions that have already been tested in a randomized controlled trial with justice-involved adults.  Based on this systematic review, the profession of social work can help to proliferate the use of evidence-based interventions with justice-involved adults as well as work to fill in the identified gaps with a comprehensive agenda of intervention research.