As you mentioned previously when a random assignment of participants to treatment or control groups is not feasible for practical, ethical, or legal reasons, is there any plan B for community corrections programs?

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Then you may choose quasi-experimental evaluation designs to approximate the advantages of random selection. One such design involves identifying a comparison group that is similar to the treatment group in those characteristics thought to be capable of influencing the outcome under examination. The strength of this design rests on the extent to which all the influential characteristics are accounted for in selecting the control group. The analyst can then account statistically for differences between groups that might influence the observed outcomes. The only requirements are that no differentiating characteristic belongs uniquely to one group and that such competing factors be measured in both groups. Because the use of a nonrandom comparison group does not eliminate all alternative explanations for the relationship between treatment and outcome, this type of design requires much more complicated analysis and yields fewer certain results than true experiments. Nonetheless, quasi-experimental designs can at times produce findings that are much stronger than other types of evaluation methods that impose fewer controls (e.g., case studies, before/after comparisons, descriptive models).