Rehabilitating convicted criminals is challenging; indeed, an important share of them return to prison only a few years after their release.Thus, finding effective ways of encouraging crime desistance, particularly among young individuals, has become an important policy goal to reduce crime and incarceration rates.This paper provides causal evidence that the local institutions of the neighborhood that receives young individuals after prison matter.Specifically, we show that the opening of an Evangelical church reduces twelve-months re-incarceration rates among property crime offenders by more than 10 percentage points.This effect represents a drop of 16% in the probability of returning to prison for this group of individuals.We find smaller and less precise effects for more severe types of crime.We discuss two classes of mechanisms that could explain our results: religiosity and social support.We provide evidence that the social support provided by evangelical churches is an important driver of our findings.This suggests that non-religious local institutions could also play an important role in the rehabilitation of former inmates.

Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, looking across generations, elite colleges do both. Lower-status individuals who gain admission to elite college programs transform their children’s social environment. Children become more likely to attend high-status private schools and colleges and to live near and befriend high-status peers. In contrast, academic achievement is unaffected. Simulations combining descriptive and quasi-experimental findings show that elite colleges tighten the link between social and human capital while decreasing intergenerational social mobility.