That's a great question. The key thing is that all of these projects are pretty new, so in terms of their impact on the ultimate outcomes, we still have to be patient. You serve people for a couple a years, you wait a couple of years to see if they reoffend, and then you know what happened. We're still in that period.
I've learned three things about this model, though, that I didn't know six months ago. The first is that it is actually possible to put one of these projects together. Mr. Butler was describing how, when they started down this road, they just didn't know whether it was actually going to be possible to raise the investor dollars, given the risk. We've now seen that it actually is possible. If you start down this road and you put together a good project, you actually can get it off the ground and provide services. That's the first thing we learned.
The second thing we learned was that the governments that set up these projects decided to do more of them. One possibility was that they'd go through this process and say, “All right, we did one, but I'm never going to do another one again. This was too hard.” But that's not what happened. Both New York state and Massachusetts, when they started delivering services on their recidivism projects, immediately announced that they would do more of these projects. They found them to be tools that were allowing them to do things they just couldn't get done with conventional tools. Massachusetts said it was going to do a homelessness project and an adult literacy project, and New York state said, following on their recidivism project, they were going to do a diabetes project and an early childhood project. That's the second thing we learned.
I think the third thing we're seeing in the projects that are on the ground—I'd love to hear if Mr. Butler agrees—is that it really is the case that because there is this private attention to these projects, when you hit the bumps in the road that you hit in any project, you see an urgency in solving those problems, which, at least in my two stints in government, I didn't always see as being something that was easy to get the public sector to achieve.
So I do think we are seeing this focus on outcomes and the money at stake actually having an impact on how the services are being delivered on the ground.