This report evaluates the Ready, Willing & Able program; it describes program participation and completion, and it evaluates whether participating in the program has a significant effect on reducing rates of criminal recidivism.
This evaluation report has the purpose of describing Ready, Willing & Able (RWA) program participation and completion in order to determine whether the program has a significant effect on reducing recidivism rates. The report contains five major sections: a history and description of RWA; an overview of program characteristics and participation of clients between January 2004 and the end of June 2009; a review of program completion, including a description of clients who maintain graduate criteria, such as employment, housing, and sobriety; an analysis of the criminal justice impacts of RWA; and a cost-benefit analysis, which compares the costs of RWA to the economic and social benefits of the program. The report concludes that RWA clients were less likely to have been re-arrested at two and three years after release from prison than their matched non-RWA counterparts; three years after prison release, RWA clients had 30 percent fewer arrests than the comparison group with matching demographics and criminal history; and RWA clients were significantly less likely to be sentenced to jail, three years after their release from prison, than members of the control group. There was also some evidence for a decline in program impacts on recidivism after two years, however cost-benefit analysis calculations indicated that the RWA program benefits still exceeded the costs by about 20 percent.