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The current study focused on 479 men and women from South Carolina who were enrolled as participants in the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) multi-site program evaluation shortly before prison release in 2004 or 2005. The original SVORI data suggested that the South Carolina respondents were similar to the multi-site sample with "committed to not going back to prison" as the most common reason for desisting and using drugs or alcohol as the most common reason for persisting. The goals of the current study were to (1) update information on the current status of these individuals across multiple domains (e.g., housing, employment, substance use); (2) gather additional administrative recidivism data to examine long-term offending; and (3) acquire information about the factors individuals associated with their decisions to desist from criminal activity, as well as circumstances associated with renewed criminal activity or desistence. Interviews were conducted with those that the study team were able to locate and additional administrative arrest and incarceration data were acquired for the full sample, providing recidivism follow-up over at least a 10-year period.

Official administrative data were obtained from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (rearrests) and South Carolina Department of Corrections (reincarcerations). Arrest data span the entire arrest history (from first arrest through December 2015); reincarceration data span the period between the SVORI study prison release in 2005 and 2006 through June 2014. These data were obtained for the full sample of 479 South Carolina SVORI participants.

Three components of interview data were collected.

• Desistance study interview data: 1 wave of in-person interviews was conducted with 208 study subjects who consented to participate in an interview. The research team used computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) to administer the survey, and interviews were conducted from September 2016 through March 2017.
• Life event data: The Life Events Calendar (LEC) is a tool used in qualitative and quantitative research to gather retrospective information about a person's life, experiences, and history. The approach is based on autobiographical memory and how entering events on a calendar or page help facilitate memory recall. LECs typically encompass periods of 5 years or less; this study's LEC covered a 10- to 12-year span to allow analysis since last contact with the study cohort. Data were collected from the 208 subjects who consented to be interviewed.
• SVORI interview data: This inventory includes files with select baseline and outcome data (e.g., self-reported employment, drug use, criminal behavior) for desistance study subjects who responded to follow-up interviews at Wave 2 (3-month), Wave 3 (9-month), and Wave 4 (15-month).

This collection of administrative and interview data is organized into 14 data parts. Demographic data includes information on age, gender, race, and education.

These data are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they were received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed except for the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompanying readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collection and consult the investigator(s) if further information is needed.

This study, with assistance from the National Institute of Justice's Data Resources Program (FY2012), is a reanalysis of data from the national evaluation of the federal Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI). SVORI provided funding to 69 agencies across the United States to enhance reentry programs and coordination between corrections and community services. The national evaluation covered 16 of these sites, twelve of which provided services to the 2,054 adult ex-prisoners who are the focus of the present study.

The purpose of this study is to understand whether or not offenders receive the services they say they need, and whether the degree of 'fit' between this self-reported criminogenic need and services received is related to recidivism. This study analyzes data from the SVORI multisite evaluation to assess the potential explanations for the mixed effectiveness of reentry programs. The goal is to understand whether or not service-risk/need fit is related to successful reentry outcomes, or whether the needs of returning prisoners are unrelated to their risk of recidivism regardless of how well they are addressed. For the present study researchers obtained the SVORI (ICPSR 27101) outcome evaluation datasets from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD). The archive holds four separate datasets from the evaluation: Adult Males Data (Part 1, N=1,697), Adult Females Data (Part 2, N=357), Juvenile Males Data (Part 3, N=337) and official recidivism and reincarceration data (Part 4, N=35,469), which can be linked on a one-to-many basis with the individual-level data in the other three datasets. To prepare the SVORI data for analysis researchers merged Datasets 1 and 2 (Adult Males and Adult Females) and created seven separate datasets containing Waves 1 through 4 survey data, National Crime Information Center (NCIC) crime data, administrative data, and sampling weights.

This deposit to NACJD is intended to complement the existing SVORI dataset (ICPSR 27101). It contains an R syntax file to be used with the datasets contained in the ICPSR 27101 collection.

The Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) funded agencies to develop programs to improve criminal justice, employment, education, health, and housing outcomes for released prisoners. SVORI was a goal-oriented initiative that specified outcomes that should be achieved by programs that were developed locally. The original Multi-site Evaluation of SVORI funded under NIJ grant 2004-RE-CX-0002 included a quasi-experimental impact evaluation to determine the effectiveness of programming. Specifically, the purpose of the impact evaluation was to determine whether individuals who participated in enhanced reentry programming, as measured by their enrollment in SVORI programs, had improved post-release outcomes than comparable individuals who did not participate in SVORI programming. Impact evaluation data collection for both SVORI and non-SVORI participants consisted of four waves of in-person, computer-assisted interviews and oral swab drug tests conducted in conjunction with two of the follow-up interviews. The research team collected data on a total of 2,391 individuals including 1,697 adult males (Part 1), 357 adult females (Part 2), and 337 juvenile males (Part 3). As part of the impact evaluation, experienced RTI field interviewers conducted pre-release interviews with offenders approximately 30 days before release from prison and a series of follow-up interviews at 3, 9, and 15 months post-release. These data provided information on criminal history and recidivism occurring by December 31, 2007. The Adult Males Data (Part 1), Adult Females Data (Part 2), and the Juvenile Males Data (Part 3) each contain the same 5,566 variables from the 3 waves of offender interviews, 10 drug test lab results variables, and 3 weight variables. (Note: Some interview questions were only asked of adults, and other questions were only asked of juveniles.) Offender interview variables include demographics, housing, employment, education, military experience, family background, peer relationships, program operations and services, physical and mental health, substance abuse, crime and delinquency, and attitudes toward those topics.

Under NIJ Grant 2009-IJ-CX-0010, the original Multi-site Evaluation of SVORI data were updated in order to examine the questions of, "What works, for whom, and for how long?" This included follow-up interview questions of those previously (and currently still) incarcerated. New variables derived from data collected under the original SVORI impact evaluation between 2004 and 2007 were also added to Part 3. Part one included an additional 100 variables, part two an additional 102 variables and part 3 an additional 99 variables.