This new program “The Joyce Foundation’s Transitional Jobs Reentry Demonstration: Testing Strategies to Help Former Prisoners Find and Keep Jobs and Stay Out of Prison”, is one to watch—especially as it will be strictly evaluated using random selection and a control group—crucial to determining program effectiveness.
The program involves providing subsidized transitional jobs, usually of 4 months or so, to just released prisoners, and along with the other services being provided, may actually make a dent in the reentry numbers, at least for the short term; but the moral problem of providing criminals with services not available to those who are struggling who are not criminals, remains.
We will come back to this in a year, when the full evaluation is expected, to see how it does.
Two excerpts from the report.
“The TJRD project targets men age 18 or older who were released from state prison within 90 days prior to enrollment in the study. It is widely believed that the first weeks after people are released from prison are a critical period in determining whether their transition will be successful. Men with all types of criminal histories were accepted into the project, with no project-wide restrictions based on the number or type of previous offenses (there were some limitations in individual sites).
“The sites recruited men into the study from January 2007 through September 2008. Slightly more than 1,800 men entered the study in all, with the site totals ranging from about 375 to 500.” (p. 12)
“All provide participants with temporary, minimum-wage jobs that offer 30 to 40 hours of paid work each week; all aim to identify and address behavior or performance issues that emerge at the work site; all provide a range of ancillary services and supports to participants; and all help participants look for unsubsidized jobs to follow the transitional jobs, often with the help of job developers who reach out to employers to identify job openings for participants.” (p. 10)
Lampstand Foundation website, http://www.lampstandfoundation.org/
"The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity. Nobody is so competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. Nobody, except the saint." Charles Peguy (1873-1914)
About
- David H. Lukenbill
- I am a California native, married, we have one daughter and live close to the American River with two cats and all the wild critters we can feed. I am a management consultant to nonprofit organizations and have an Associates of Arts degree in Administration of Justice from Sacramento City College, a Bachelor of Science degree in Organizational Behavior from the University of San Francisco and a Master of Public Administration degree, also from the University of San Francisco.