A criminal justice reform program that spread to dozens of cities across more than twenty states was built on statistical errors that drastically exaggerated its effectiveness, according to a report published by the Washington Policy Center. The Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion model, celebrated at the White House and backed by hundreds of millions in federal, state, and philanthropic dollars since 2015, promoted a widely cited claim that it cut arrest rates by 58%. The report concludes that this figure roughly doubled or tripled the program's actual results by confusing an abstract odds measure with real-world percentage drops in arrests.
The confusion began with LEAD's 2015 pilot evaluation, which stated participants were "58% less likely than people in the control group to be arrested." But the actual difference in arrests may have been no more than 22 percentage points, and the LEAD group showed no statistically significant differences in typical arrests or criminal charges, the report states. Beyond crime metrics, advocates claimed participants' odds of being on an "employment continuum" rose by 46%, but this translated to just three additional people finding actual jobs out of 176 participants—leaving an estimated 91% unemployed during the 18-month follow-up. Housing claims were similarly misleading: while advocates said participants were "89% more likely to obtain permanent housing," only an estimated 19 of 146 unhoused participants appeared permanently housed in a given month, a 13% success rate. Half as many LEAD participants died during the study as entered permanent housing, and three times as many died as gained employment.
The report finds that these false statistics quickly spread through Congress and fueled bipartisan support for the program. Two months after the study's release, a district attorney told a House Judiciary subcommittee that LEAD cut recidivism by 80%, prompting Representative Jim Sensenbrenner to call it "the most important thing we ought to look at." During May 2016 floor debate on the Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Reduction Act, Representative Suzan DelBene cited a false 60% reduction in reoffending to support her amendment codifying drug diversion programs into federal law, with other members echoing the inflated figures. Congress later wrote LEAD into federal law by name, and federal funding alone grew from $2.5 million in 2018 to at least $10-11 million annually from fiscal years 2020 through 2026. A 2024 federal audit revealed significant deficiencies in internal controls and material weakness in compliance with procurement procedures, while implementers routinely failed to report basic outcomes like mortality rates, housing independence, job progression, or drug abstinence.
The report attributes LEAD's expansion to a breakdown in public oversight, with state and local governments assuming proper vetting had occurred at the federal level. The program's framework directly contradicts federal recovery guidelines: while the government's SAMHSA Recovery Framework defines recovery as including abstinence from illicit drugs and developing independence and income, LEAD operates "without imposing expectations for abstinence" and requires no participation beyond intake and information release. In August 2026, the program's founder stated that jobs aren't a stated goal. The report argues that weak oversight allowed dangerous precedent to take root, turning an unproven experiment into an endorsed national alternative while critical questions about participant outcomes went unasked for over a decade.
The report calls for immediate congressional scrutiny and a fundamental reassessment of how criminal justice reform is evaluated and funded in the United States. For eleven years, policymakers and the public were told a story of 58% crime reductions and widespread recovery, but the reality was a program that left most participants unemployed, unhoused, and aligned with goals opposite to federal best practices. The pattern of false claims and unquestioned appropriations exposes what the report describes as a severe failure of accountability that demands urgent correction.