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.

The implementation of evidence-based policies hinges on the dissemination of evidence to policymakers, a process influenced by the attributes of the sender. We conduct a country-wide RCT in which two ideologically opposite prominent think tanks, two major newspapers, and a research institution with nonsalient ideology communicate identical information about a low-cost, non-ideological, and effective policy based on published research findings to a large sample of Spanish local policymakers. We measure the impact of information directly on policy adoption and find heterogeneous effects. When the informing institution aligns ideologically with policymakers, communicating research results leads to a more than 65% increase in policy adoption compared to an uninformed control group, while informing from an opposite ideology does not lead to policy adoption. Our design also allows us to compare the impact of knowledge brokers, such as think tanks, and coverage in leading newspapers in adopting public policies. We find that, when ideologically aligned with policymakers, both are equally effective in increasing policy adoption. We propose a three-stage conceptual framework of policy adoption processes - selective exposure to information, belief updating, and policy implementation- and show that ideological alignment does not influence selective exposure to information. However, evidence from a post-intervention online experiment shows that ideological alignment affects belief updating regarding a recommended policy's effectiveness. Finally, we discuss the trade-offs between effectiveness and outreach when using ideologically aligned and nonsalient institutions to disseminate research evidence and comment on the economic impact of ideological alignment for policy implementation.