The United States spends over a billion dollars a year on housing programs that give recently released prisoners a place to stay and modest support before reintegration into society. Yet there is little causal evidence that these programs work.

In a paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, author Logan M. Lee estimated whether residential housing programs in Iowa kept prisoners from returning to prison. He found that instead of reducing recidivism, prisoners assigned to halfway houses appeared to have higher rates of reincarceration than those who were paroled.

Lee recently spoke with Tyler Smith about how he arrived at his estimates and whether or not residential housing programs should be scaled back in the United States.