Medical loss ratios are a significant new regulation of insurance markets contained in the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act. The Texas Department of Insurance contends that they will destabilize the state's small group and individual insurance marketplaces. Last week, the Texas Public Policy Foundation published a Policy Perspective on this topic, and we bring you a conversation with its author, Spencer Harris, the Foundation's health care policy analyst. Download the mp3 here!

Parole is sometimes considered an afterthought in the correctional system. The true work in an offender’s life, the theory goes, happens while locked up. Parole is merely a way to keep an eye on recently freed prisoners for a bit.

In reality, parole and reentry programming is integral to an effective correctional system, and this is doubly true for juvenile offenders.

Intensive, comprehensive reentry programming for juvenile offenders not only ensures that the lessons learned while locked up in one of Texas’ secure institutions truly take hold, but also that the juvenile makes a smooth transition back to his or her family, friends, school, and community.

On the other hand, poor parole programming, consisting of little more than monthly check-ins, does nothing to ensure that the costly incarceration will have any positive effect on future behavior. Nor does it ensure that the juvenile is prepared for the seismic jolt back into real life.

Two Texas counties, Bexar and Harris, are experimenting with a more intensive reentry process. Bexar County’s is called the Children’s Aftercare Reentry Experience, or CARE. This program provides a one-stop shop for every resource and program needed to successfully transition a juvenile offender out of a residential facility and into a law-abiding, productive life. From mentorship to job training to education and life skills, CARE streamlines the reentry process into one building with heightened oversight and accountability.

The Harris County pilot program is Parenting with Love and Limits, or PLL. This is a therapy-based model, which includes both the juvenile and his or her family. The family is taught better parenting skills and the juvenile is taught better responses to parental discipline. This form of reentry seeks to replace state correction with parental correction—the natural and most appropriate form of juvenile behavior correction.

The preliminary research suggests that both programs produce substantially better outcomes than traditional parole programming. Recidivism in juveniles has been cut 25-50 percent in other sites using PLL; out of the first group of youths to successfully complete the CARE program in Bexar County, not a single one has been re-incarcerated.

This is the most important outcome of intensive reentry: preventing further taxpayer expenditures on youth who are repeatedly re-arrested and re-incarcerated. The near-constant growth of corrections expenditures across the nation is due in part to high recidivism rates. By reducing those rates and instead producing more law-abiding citizens who are off the state roll and working, living, or learning in safer communities, expenditures can be decreased and the burden on taxpayers may be eased.

Current parole programming is doing little to ease the burden on taxpayers. Texas spends large sums of money on each juvenile offender, only to produce 35 percent re-incarceration rates after three years. The result is that Texas taxpayers are not receiving the best return for their tax dollars. Furthermore, the current parole budget has stagnated while the parole population was cut in half, suggesting inefficiencies and budget bloat.

More intensive re-entry can be paid for by slight decreases in lengths of stay for nonviolent offenders in juvenile facilities, which would not disrupt public safety; and with operational cost savings that are more than adequate to cover the cost, in addition to decreasing the overall juvenile justice budget. Evidence suggests the minimal risk posed by the youth being in the community for a slightly longer period is more than offset by the potential recidivism reduction from enhanced reentry programming.

Texas taxpayers deserve better. A more efficient and more effective juvenile justice system protects public safety while rehabilitating juveniles and not burdening taxpayers any more than necessary. While further outcome evaluations are necessary, intensive reentry programming promises to be an integral part of creating that more efficient, effective juvenile justice system.