25188-The Florida work rel

The study's authors assembled a data set including (1) corrections data from the Florida Department of Corrections, (2) arrest data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and (3) employment data from the Florida Department of Revenue. People in these data sets who completed a work release program from 2004 to 2011 formed the intervention group. People who were released from prison from 2004 to 2011 and were eligible for the program but did not participate formed the comparison group, with eligibility criteria including being assessed as having sufficient skills to be employable, being likely to have a successful transition into the community after release from prison, and not posing a significant risk to the public. Cases were excluded if the individual was sentenced to prison or released to a state or country other than Florida, or if the individual was sentenced in Florida but never entered the prison system. Cases were also excluded if key baseline characteristics were missing from the data set. The final data set included 171,933 individual inmates and 201,447 releases from prison. People could be in the data set multiple times if they were released from prison multiple times during the study period.