Halfway houses and treatment outcomes; a relationship between institutional atmosphere and therapeutic effectiveness.

when they leave an institution and have no place to go. Halfway houses first emerged in the 1950s in an attempt to meet recovering alcoholics' needs for food, shelter, counseling and support. And, as the network of alcoholism treatment services grew and diversified in the 1970s, so did halfway houses. In the mid-1950s, there were probably no more than 50 halfway houses in the whole country (1); by the 1970s, there were more than 500 (2). Halfway houses also became part of a social movement which was reacting against the absence of appropriate facilities for recovering alcoholics as well as the presence of inappropriate facilities. The halfway-house movement (2-4) rose in reaction against the failures of large impersonal treatment organizations. Its pioneers believed that halfway houses could be much more effective in aiding the recovery of their residents than could the traditional bureaucratic treatment facilities then in existence. They based these strongly held beliefs on the fact that halfway houses accommodated only a small number of residents at a time, had an elementary kind of social organization, only a few rules and, perhaps most important of all, an informal, "homelike atmosphere." This