Congratulations to Sarah Shannon and her colleagues in social work for their new publication in the Journal of Crime and Justice!https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0735648X.2025.2592204ABSTRACTReentry services are essential in helping address the multi-faceted challenges people face upon their return to the community from incarceration. To date, research has focused largely on treatment needs, isolated interventions, and the effects of program participation on recidivism. Much less is known about the combinations of services that formerly incarcerated people engage with and how service use may impact psychological outcomes. The current study uses longitudinal data to establish latent classes of service utilization among a sample of formerly incarcerated adults. Additionally, this study moves beyond focusing on recidivism to examine how latent profiles are related to subsequent levels of psychological distress. Results suggest three distinct profiles of service utilization – high service users, low service users, and high substance use service users. Further, our results find that service profiles were associated with longitudinal differences in psychological distress. The findings are contextualized within the wider reentry and behavioral health landscapes.
