The TSP Office Hours team just posted their first “Drop In,” which are shorter versions of Office Hours Podcasts.   Drop Ins (about 10 minutes) would make great assignments or are even short enough to listen to in class.  In the first Drop In, TSP talks with Matt Snodgrass about his work on the relationship between time served in prison and reoffending.  Here are some questions you could assign or discuss in class:

1.  Why might some people expect that there is a relationship between the amount of time spent in prison and reoffending after release?

2.  Snodgrass talks briefly about his methodology.  What makes this type of study tricky, and what did he and his colleagues do to get around this?

3.  What are the policy implications of the results found in this study and similar studies?