California spent $600M to house and rehab former prisoners — but can’t say if it helped

AS GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM retools the state’s prison system to emphasize rehabilitation, his administration has little evidence that a privately run program for parolees costing taxpayers $100 million a year works to prevent future crime.

The state does not collect data on whether parolees who participate in the program have found jobs or whether they are returned to prison for another crime. What state data does show is that only 40 percent of participants completed at least one of the services they were offered.