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Policy Framework
The more than 600,000 people who are released from prison each year face a range of obstacles to successful reentry into the community. Perhaps not surprisingly, outcomes are often poor: Two-thirds of those who are released from prison are rearrested and half are reincarcerated within three years. States and localities throughout the nation are searching for programmatic approaches to improve reentry outcomes, but there is little evidence about which strategies work best.
Many believe that it is most critical to address former prisoners’ employment needs in the period immediately following their release. The Joyce Foundation’s new Transitional Jobs Reentry Demonstration will provide highly reliable evidence about the effectiveness of transitional employment, a particularly promising employment-based reentry model. The foundation has selected MDRC to lead the evaluation of this important initiative. The Urban Institute and the University of Michigan are also playing key roles as subcontractors to MDRC.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
Transitional work programs place participants into temporary, wage-paying jobs and provide ongoing support and assistance. The temporary jobs provide former prisoners with much-needed income in the period just following release; they also allow program staff an opportunity to identify and try to resolve any workplace behaviors that may cause participants problems in a permanent job. After a few months in the transitional job, participants get help looking for a permanent position and then receive additional post-placement support.
The transitional jobs model has been used in many jurisdictions with both welfare recipients and ex-prisoners and has shown some promising outcomes. The new study will provide hard evidence about whether transitional jobs connect reentering prisoners to unsubsidized jobs, increase their earnings, and lower their rates of recidivism.
The Transitional Jobs Reentry Demonstration includes programs in four Midwestern cities: Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and St. Paul.
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
The Transitional Jobs Reentry Demonstration is using a rigorous random assignment research design to measure what difference the programs make. Ex-prisoners who agree to participate in the study are assigned, at random, to a program group that has access to the transitional jobs program or to a control group that receives basic job search assistance.
The MDRC team will follow both groups for at least one year, using unemployment insurance earnings and criminal justice data from the participating states to measure employment and recidivism outcomes. Because the random assignment process ensures that the two groups are comparable at the start of the study, any significant differences that emerge over time can be attributed to the transitional jobs program.
What's Next
The evaluation will be completed in 2009.
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