DOL Pay for Success

Roca - the Massachusetts project - is a 4-year program for young male parolees and probationers. It seeks to foster strong relationships with program staff to change destructive thinking patterns, and provides transitional employment and workforce training.
Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), the NY project, is a 4-6 month program for high-risk adult parolees just released from prison. It provides training in life skills and work readiness, paid transitional employment, job placement assistance, and post-employment follow-up.

Under the Pay for Success (PFS) funding model, private investors (e.g., Goldman Sachs, philanthropic foundations) pay for program delivery, and get repaid by government - possibly with a return - only if the program achieves specific, pre-specified results as verified through evaluation.

DOL, to its credit, required rigorous evaluations - resulting in sizable RCTs of both programs. The Roca RCT recruited a sample of 991 young men in 2014-15; the CEO RCT recruited a sample of 2,357 adult parolees from late 2013-2015.

Unfortunately, interim findings of both RCTs (average of 1.5-2 years after study entry for Roca, and >1 year for CEO) show near-zero impact on the targeted outcomes: days individuals were sentenced to incarceration, and employment rate. So, per the PFS model, investors weren't repaid.

But both projects and RCTs are continuing, in hope that impacts will materialize with larger samples and longer follow-up.

Frustratingly, DOL's report only provides high-level details on the RCTs, not enough to gauge study quality; hopefully DOL or other parties will release a full report in the future.

Disclosure: my former employer, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures), invested in both PFS projects and is helping fund the Roca RCT.