The paper attempts to illustrate that: knowledge-driven change in practice is possible; monitoring the outcomes of that change is desirable; and continued incremental change will always be needed to refine and refocus what is done. The evaluation described in this paper takes as its starting point the need to clearly document some beneficial impact of involvement in a shorter-term cognitive-behavioral and social learning based program for substance users. This paper can provide only a basic overview of the exhaustive outcome evaluation of the effectiveness of these programs. While the results of this evaluation were encouraging in terms of the overall effects on post-release outcomes, the findings pointed to a number of areas where the programs may not have reached their full potential impact: (1) There may be beneficial effects from layering substance user programs in a manner that provides intensive and continuous program exposure; (2) the community setting is critical to obtaining maximum benefits from substance user programming; (3) offenders who did not complete programs had the poorest outcomes; and (4) there is a need to develop methods for motivating reluctant offenders to remain involved with programs over extended periods. The results of the evaluation were disappointing with respect to the apparent inability of the programs to increase the timeliness of release. Tables, figure, notes, references