The New York Times followed up on a previous column about prisoner reentry with a column today about the roadblocks to successful reentry that prisoners and organizations that assist former prisoners face. The column notes that while there are existing programs that work to help former prisoners with critical needs--housing, job training, drug treatment, etc.--these programs often do not have much funding and have not been widely adopted. Peggy McGarry, director of Vera's Center on Sentencing and Corrections, offers one reason why:

A related reason is that advocates of new strategies rarely have the research that would allow them to make their case. Especially with an issue like crime, it is important to be able to offer proof to counter the emotion. But many aspects of why people commit crimes and how to stop them have been little studied. “Research is very expensive to do,” said Peggy McGarry, the director of the Center on Sentencing and Corrections for the New York-based Vera Institute. “You have to create a comparison group out of the files of a public agency, create a database, do interviews. It is getting harder and harder to persuade private funders to spend money on research because the human need is just so great. And they are not convinced that legislatures and government offices are going to do anything with the results of it anyway. Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to evaluate the Castle if you are not convinced that New York State will try to replicate it?”