The InnerChange Freedom Initiative has been controversial for years. The program, created by Watergate-felon Chuck Colson, aims to convert incarcerated felons to fundamentalist Christianity and, in the process, make them less likely to commit crimes again in the future.
George W. Bush, as Texas’ governor, praised the program and welcomed them into the state’s criminal justice system with open arms. He later touted InnerChange as the kind of program he wanted the federal government to support through his “faith-based” initiative.
Inmates in the InnerChange program have luxurious benefits denied to other imprisoned convicts. In Newton, Iowa, for example, inmates who are willing to endure aggressive evangelizing and multiple prayer sessions a day are rewarded with bathroom privacy and even keys to their cells. The special-unit inmates also enjoy big-screen television, free phone calls to family members, less taxing prison jobs and access to computers and art supplies for creative projects. As Carpetbagger friend Morbo put it, these are “perks general-population inmates can only dream about.”
Despite the fact that the program is run by an evangelical Christian organization that makes no effort to hide the religious purpose of their efforts, InnerChange not only has working ties with several state governments, it is also beginning to receive public funds to do their work (though that may change if a recently filed lawsuit challenging such funding is successful).
The problem for InnerChange’s critics has been a political one, not a legal one. Even those inclined to support church-state separation on principle tend to like the idea that hardened criminals will become religious, find some kind of inner peace, and be less dangerous to society at large. The question becomes one of effectiveness. If InnerChange can help rehabilitate prison inmates, and make them less likely to commit crimes again in the future, even some good liberals have seemed willing to overlook the constitutional problem.
In other words, does InnerChange work? Does it change lives and reduce crime? The answer, in a nutshell, is no.
Data on the program’s effectiveness has been minimal in recent years. InnerChange’s administrators claim tremendous — almost miraculous — success rates. Some InnerChange supporters in Congress claim that 86% of those who complete the evangelism program do not get arrested again upon release from prison, which is twice as good a recidivism rate as the non-InnerChange convicts.
These numbers have always been highly dubious, primarily because the program was dealing with a self-selected sample. InnerChange picks and chooses who can participate in their program and who can’t. Naturally, they select those people most receptive to Christian evangelism and most likely to succeed. With this in mind, statistical comparisons against a larger prison population are skewed to the point of meaninglessness.
Nevertheless, social scientists and researchers continue independent studies of InnerChange to see if the program works as well as the group claims.
As UCLA professor and blogger extraordinaire Mark A.R. Kleiman explained in Slate, a study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society has some fascinating results on InnerChange and its results.
Almost immediately after the University of Pennsylvania’s study was released, it was heralded by supporters of faith-based efforts. As Kleiman noted, the White House, Tom DeLay, members of the Senate, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and the entire religious right “have been crowing since June over news that President George W. Bush’s favorite faith-based initiative is a smashing success.”
What’s the problem? None of these people actually bothered to read the University of Pennsylvania’s study. Mark Kleiman did. “[W]hen when you look carefully at the Penn study, it’s clear that the program didn’t work. The InnerChange participants did somewhat worse than the controls: They were slightly more likely to be rearrested and noticeably more likely (24 percent versus 20 percent) to be reimprisoned.”
Instead of trying to explain how and why the study got so twisted around by those who support faith-based funding, I’ll just let Kleiman tell it.
“[H]ow did the Penn study get perverted into evidence that InnerChange worked? Through one of the oldest tricks in the book, one almost guaranteed to make a success of any program: counting the winners and ignoring the losers,” Kleiman said. “The technical term for this in statistics is ‘selection bias’; program managers know it as ‘creaming.’ Harvard public policy professor Anne Piehl, who reviewed the study before it was published, calls this instance of it ‘cooking the books.’
“InnerChange started with 177 volunteer prisoners but only 75 of them ‘graduated.’ Graduation involved sticking with the program, not only in prison but after release. No one counted as a graduate, for example, unless he got a job. Naturally, the graduates did better than the control group. Anything that selects out from a group of ex-inmates those who hold jobs is going to look like a miracle cure, because getting a job is among the very best predictors of staying out of trouble. And inmates who stick with a demanding program of self-improvement through 16 months probably have more inner resources, and a stronger determination to turn their lives around, than the average inmate.
“The InnerChange cheerleaders simply ignored the other 102 participants who dropped out, were kicked out, or got early parole and didn’t finish. Naturally, the non-graduates did worse than the control group. If you select out the winners, you leave mostly losers.
“Overall, the 177 entrants did a little bit worse than the controls. That result ought to discourage InnerChange’s advocates, but it doesn’t because they have just ignored the failure of the failures and focused on the success of the successes.
“The Penn study doesn’t conceal the actual poor outcome: All the facts reported above come straight from that report. But the study goes out of its way to put a happy face on the sad results, leading with the graduates-only figures before getting to the grim facts. Apparently, the Prison Fellowship press office simply wrote a press release off the spin, and the White House worked off the press release. Probably no one was actually lying; they were just believing, and repeating as fact, what they wanted to believe. It’s hard to know for sure what those involved were thinking: Study author Byron Johnson canceled a scheduled interview at the last moment. The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.”