Examining Compliance With Court-Ordered Diversionary Programs

State-ordered diversionary programs, such as treatment, reentry, and rehabilitation programs, provide alternatives to incarceration for defendants, probationers, and parolees. To take part in and complete these programs, various outlays and expenditures can be required. This project will examine the social, economic, and legal consequences of these costs on compliance with court-ordered treatment, rehabilitation, and reentry programs.

This project will document the underlying structural mechanisms involved in participating in and completing state-ordered diversionary programs. Access to resources, including money, information, flexible work schedules, reliable transportation, and time, is necessary to avoid noncompliance with these programs. The research will include a randomized control trial (RCT) that will causally investigate whether and how investments in rehabilitation programming, as well as the alleviation of particular forms of disadvantage, can increase program participation and completion rates.

The project will use full sample comparisons between treatment and control groups to estimate the effects of economic, socioeconomic, and informational variables on rates of program enrollment, dropout, re-enrollment, and completion. Findings from the RCT will be included as inputs to an agent-based simulation model that will evaluate influences on compliance with rehabilitation and reentry programs at the population level.

The result will be an assessment of the causal relationships involved in compliance rates as the project tabulates shadow costs and measures willful noncompliance with court-ordered diversionary programs. This project is supported by the Law and Science Program and the SBE Science of Broadening Participation Program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.