Northpointe Institute for Public Management
“Northpointe is an experienced and nationally recognized correctional consulting and research firm providing software products, consulting, training, and implementation services to federal, state, and local criminal justice systems and policy makers.” FOCUS was granted the funds through its Justice Assistance Grant for a year (2011) Northpointe evaluation.
Some of the conclusions of the report:
- The number of new arrests during the follow-up period was much larger for the control group than for the FOCUS group. There were totals of 26 and 9 arrests for the control and FOCUS groups, respectively. (pg. 5)
- All of the arrests for the FOCUS group were for misdemeanors or petty offenses (0%). In contrast, for the control group, 7 of the arrests were for felony offenses (27%). (pg 6).
- The amount of time that a mentor spends with a mentee could possibly predict positive outcomes for the mentee and reflect one way in which the FOCUS intervention is effective. In fact, the mean number of hours that mentors spent with the 16 mentees that were not re-arrested at least once was much larger (mean = 29.5) than the number of hours that the mentors spent with the 4 mentees who were re-arrested at least once (mean = 9.7). (pg 8)
- The major result of this study is that the incidence rate for re-arrest rate for the FOCUS group was significantly lower than the incidence rate for a comparable group of control subjects. The incidence rates for the two groups differed by a factor of 4. Analysis of the time that the mentors and mentees spent together along with descriptive data on the various activities that the mentors and mentees carried out together indicates that the intervention was quite intense. The large time commitments by the mentors and mentees no doubt contributed to the effectiveness of the intervention.
On the basis of our results, the recidivism rate as usually defined (re-arrest within a year) should be significantly lower for people who have received the FOCUS intervention than for people who have not. A reduction in the recidivism rate of a factor of 4 would be consistent with our findings, but additional data collected from a larger pool of offender/mentees is needed to confirm this finding. Hence, the recidivism rate of 67% in the jail population could be reduced with the FOCUS intervention to a rate as low as 17%. We are continuing to expand the number of offenders in the FOCUS program and to collect data through 2012 to verify this conclusion.
