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Would bank accounts for ex-prisoners reduce crime?

Here's an issue that arguably merits consideration when Texas' new reentry task force meets later this week, via Dr. Karen Franklin's excellent blog on forensic psychology: Establishing bank accounts for offenders when they're released on parole. In a post last month Franklin wrote:Ever thought about how hard it would be to take care of basic business without a bank account or credit cards?In the UK, an experimental project to open bank accounts for paroling prisoners has led to a remarkable finding: The ex-cons who got bank accounts were only half as likely as other parolees to reoffend.And here's another remarkable finding: Four out of five of these guys had never had a bank account before.A university-based study is presently evaluating the effort; see a report (pdf) released in December analyzing the outcomes so far...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on January 11, 2010 (boomark / email).