| Summary: | In 1996, Washington State's Department of Corrections (DOC) implemented "New Horizons" (referred to as "First Chance" from its inception in late 1996 to early 2000), a residential therapeutic treatment community for drug-addicted women offenders housed within the Pine Lodge Pre-Release minimum security and co-ed facility in the northeastern part of the state. The target population for the program was women who had been screened and identified as having a serious substance abuse problem and who had 12 months or less to serve on their sentences. Maximum capacity for this program was established at 72 treatment slots with members of the therapeutic community residing together and separate from the rest of the general population. The program approaches addiction as a biopsychosocial disease and strives to restructure and develop pro-social cognitive, behavioral, and affective skills of addicted women offenders. This study investigated (1) factors that affected successful completion of the program, and (2) outcomes (i.e., recidivism) for Pine Lodge participants compared to outcomes for a control group. This project was funded by the National Institute Justice as part of its initiative for local evaluations of prison-based residential substance abuse treatment programs. Data represent an outcome evaluation for Pine Lodge residents compared to outcomes for a matched control group provided by the Washington State Department of Corrections. Through a case-by-case examination of the datasets from Pine Lodge and the Washington State DOC, the researchers created a data file that contained program completion/non-completion data and demographic variables for 322 Pine Lodge participants and a control group of 279 women. Variables include the month and year admitted to the Pine Lodge program, reason for leaving the program, race/ethnicity, crime committed, month and year started the program, sentence length, age, number of months in the program, education level, number of previous offenses, number of months at risk to reoffend, whether reconvicted after release, number of months between release and reconviction, and reconviction offense.
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