The Prison Journal, Ahead of Print.
We offer practical lessons from a systematic review of day reporting centers (DRCs). The review involved electronic searches, bibliographic reviews, and expert consultations followed by full text reviews of potentially eligible studies. Search results highlight the substantial role of nonacademic studies in the DRC literature, loose relationships between program characteristics and the DRC label, variations in the nature of both DRC and comparison group treatments, and a variety of methodological oversights in evaluation studies. We make a variety of recommendations both to program developers and evaluators, including an encouragement to focus on the content of programming alongside formal program titles.