CLASSIFICATION TO HALFWAY HOUSES: A QUASI‐EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION *

Abstract

Faced with prison overcrowding, institutions must seek alternatives to imprisonment. An under researched possibility is the use of halfway houses for the placement of offenders serving prison sentences. The LSI, an objective risk classification instrument, was administered to inmates from three jails. Low‐scoring inmates from two of the jails were flagged for placement in correctional halfway houses, and the third jail was blind to LSI scores. The halfway house placement rate was 51 % for the jails that used LSI scores and 16% for the jail using traditional subjective classification procedures. The results suggest that subjective offender assessments run the risk of over classifying offenders whereas objective risk assessments yield more appropriate classifications.