THE ROBERT BRUCE HALFWAY HOUSE: A STATISTICAL EVALUATION (RECIDIVISM; NEWARK, NEW JERSEY)

This dissertation, written during the years 1967-1969, was an attempt to assess the effectiveness of a halfway house operating in Newark, New Jersey during the nineteen sixties. The halfway house provided temporary support for parolees from the New Jersey State Reformatory in Bordentown, New Jersey. To be eligible for the program, a parolee had to be designated a placement problem by the parole authorities. The participants were men with little emotional and financial support in their home communities and who had very poor employment histories. The research was not particularly successful. There was no random assignment into the program. The halfway house was open to all who received the placement label and the task of showing the differences between those who chose to participate and those who did not was only partially completed. There were also many inconsistencies in the institutional files of the men; this made the attempt to operationalize several key variables quite problematic. The outcome was inconclusive. Three categories of placement cases were constructed through a statistical evaluation. In two of these groupings the halfway house participants had worse adjustment experiences than the placement cases who chose not to participate. For the one category in which the halfway house participants did better than their peers, the difference was not statistically important. The key variable in trying to overcome the lack of random assignment was the age at which the parolees first experienced institutionalization. Variables measuring the extent of a person\u27s institutional experience were far and away the best predictors of post institutional adjustment. Scholars concerned with these variables may find this research interesting