The Impact of Entrepreneurial Prison Training on Reducing Recidivism

Approximately 2.3 million Americans were in prison in 2016, costing the US $80 billion a year (English, 2016). 36% of former prisoners are re-incarcerated within three years of release, leading to a cycle of social and economic challenges (Durose, Cooper & Snyder, 2014). As evidenced by the many organizations seeking to reduce recidivism, helping those in prison to become productive members of society represents one of the “Grand Challenges” of our day (Davis et al., 2014; George et al., 2016). In this paper, we seek to be the first to causally identify the impact of entrepreneurship training on recidivism. To answer this question, we have obtained a unique data set that contains all inmates from 2009 to 2016 that were accepted into a leading prison entrepreneurial training program in the US, including those that did not receive training due to parole or medical reasons. This enables a direct comparison of trained inmates against a counterfactual of similar others due to the quasi-random allocation of the non-trained to reasons unrelated to motivation or ability to receive training. Given the significant challenges facing society due to Mass Incarceration, understanding whether these types of programs cause reductions in recidivism has the potential to shape policy while increasing the rate of entrepreneurial entry. Additionally, by uncovering more about the impact of training on the incarcerated, we highlight the potential for entrepreneurship to be used to aid in wellbeing and development among disadvantaged populations. We aim to provide a novel example of the way that entrepreneurship can be used as a lever to address Grand Challenges of our day.