Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): One would be hard-pressed to think of any connection linking Rikers Island, Goldman Sachs, and a private charitable foundation. But they're all part of a new way to finance government social services through private investment.
The NewsHour's economics correspondent, Paul Solman, looked into the project as part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.
PAUL SOLMAN (Newshour): New York City's infamous Rikers Island jail, responsible for the bulk of the city's billion-dollar corrections budget, it's home to 88,000 inmates a year, many of them regular repeat offenders.
JUDITH RODIN, Rockefeller Foundation: A complete turnstile.
PAUL SOLMAN: Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin has been as despairing as most social reformers about so-called turnstile recidivism and its costs, both to the taxpayer and to society.
JUDITH RODIN: These people don't get put back in prison for doing nothing, so there's all the social costs of what next crime they commit during this period and throughout the remaining periods that make them go back, and back, and back numerous times.
PAUL SOLMAN: But, in 2010, Rodin heard about a new financial approach to recidivism: social impact bonds.
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