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Under the Second Chance Act (SCA) of 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) awarded hundreds of grants under various categories of competition to state, local, and tribal governments to develop or enhance re-entry programs. In 2018, the First Step Act was signed into law, helping to continue the financial support of the SCA program, among other reentry-focused services. While SCA programs have been operating for about 15 years, the research conducted on these programs and their services has been relatively short-term, examining outcomes on participants no more than a few years past the point of program enrollment. There had not yet been an examination of the long-term impacts of SCA services.

In 2021, DOJ's National Institute of Justice (NIJ) awarded a cooperative agreement to NORC at the University of Chicago (NORC) and its partner, Social Policy Research Associates (SPR), to evaluate the long-term impacts of seven SCA Adult Demonstration Program grantees, which were first awarded SCA funding in FY 2009. NORC and SPR, along with an additional partner, MDRC, previously evaluated these grantees by conducting an implementation study and a randomized controlled trial (RCT) impact study, with random assignment beginning in December 2011 (or approximately two years after the grantees began operating their SCA programs) and ending in March 2013. The results of this earlier evaluation were included in an implementation study report, an 18-month impact study report, based on a follow-up survey and administrative data, and a 30-month impact study report based on administrative data.

The goal of the current longitudinal research was to estimate the impacts of the SCA program on the outcomes of the original impact study participants, over the approximately ten to twelve years following the point when these participants were first randomly assigned. More specifically the current research has sought to assess:

1. whether SCA participants demonstrated better long-term outcomes related to recidivism (arrest, conviction, and incarceration) than did control group members;
2. whether SCA participants demonstrated better long-term employment and earnings outcomes than control group members
3. whether SCA participants demonstrated better long-term outcomes on other indicators of well-being (e.g., housing, family formation, benefits, substance abuse, etc.) than control group members.

To answer these questions the study team gathered both participant survey and administrative data.

• Survey data: Using a multi-phase process, the study team began administering a survey to study participants in late November 2021 and closed the survey on December 19, 2023. At that point, all pending respondents had been contacted by study team staff multiple times. The study team was able to complete 378 interviews during the entire survey data collection period.
• Criminal justice administrative data:The study team obtained arrest, conviction, and state prison and jail incarceration data from state and local public agencies (for the counties to which participants were released or served) in the six states and seven counties in which the seven grantees operated. The study team was able to collect these data from all agencies except two (arrest data in South Dakota and jail data from Oklahoma City). These data included all periods between random assignment and nearly ten years after random assignment for all participants.
• Employment and earnings administrative data: The study team was able to access data from the Department Health and Human Services' National Directory of New Hires database which allowed for the analysis of employment and earnings data for study participants over a two-year period from July 2022 to June 2024.

Survey and administrative data were used to answer the first two research questions with survey data being the only source for the third research question.