Welcome to America, where 2.3 million people are locked up, and each year 600,000 of those individuals will be coming home, often to communities near you. For the most part, they will leave prison uneducated, unskilled, unprepared, and angry at having spent years locked away in a warehouse. This is the legacy of the law-and-order movement and the prison boom of the 1990s: America is in the midst of an incarceration and post incarceration crisis.
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI: Transitional Jobs for Individuals Exiting Prisons
Over the past several years, a growing number of researchers who specialize in prisoner reentry policy, the low-wage labor market, and strategies for increasing employment rates among dislocated workers have advocated increased federal funding for transitional jobs programs.
The general philosophy behind transitional jobs programs is that the best way to learn how to work and obtain new skills is through a paying job. Such programs are often attractive to a number of policymakers and stakeholders, regardless of their political orientation.
Although work is the basic component of any transitional jobs program, the programs also provide a range of supports, depending on the targeted population. Many of the more comprehensive programs provide a full array of services before, during, and after placement.
Pre-placement supports include aptitude tests, psychological evaluations, and workshops on things like interviewing skills, life skills, and workplace culture. During placement, many programs provide work-site support and mentoring, case management, job coaching, education, and help with basic needs like finding transportation to and from work. When individuals exit the program and make the transition to unsubsidized work, many programs continue to provide support in the form of job search assistance, job coaching, and career development.
Research on the effects of transitional jobs programs on employment has yielded encouraging results. More than 2/3 of the individuals who are placed in a transitional job will obtain unsubsidized employment by the end of their time in the program. Placement rates for individuals who successfully complete transitional jobs programs – meaning those who do not drop out – are even higher, with a number of studies suggesting rates above 80%.
Although high rates of initial unsubsidized job placement are encouraging signs, the true efficacy of transitional jobs programs hinges on their long-term impact In the case of all program participants, long-term employment is a primary indicator of success. For ex-offenders, both long-term employment and a reduction in recidivism are the desired outcomes.
Currently, a number of organizations are conducting long-term studies of transitional jobs participants to gather this outcome data. The Manpower Development Research Corporation, for example, has been particularly aggressive in its efforts on this front.
Using the limited data that is available on the long-term impacts of transitional jobs programs, a recent study suggests that a statewide transitional jobs initiative in New York would "clearly pay for itself in just three years in primary public cost savings if it [was] able to increase employment rates by more than 26% for public assistance recipients and by more than 35% for formerly incarcerated."
The study also noted that any significant decrease in recidivism would allow for a downward adjustment in ex-offender employment rates necessary to maintain the cost-benefit ratio. In this era of fiscal constraints impacting all levels of government, investing in transitional jobs initiatives is an excellent use of scarce financial resources.
In light of the evidence that transitional jobs programs represent a powerful and cost-effective means of helping prisoners reenter society, increase their long-term employment prospects, and decrease their rates of recidivism, Congress should significantly expand federal funding opportunities for such programs.
This could potentially be done through an existing framework, such as the Second Chance Act of 2007. Although funding for the Second Chance Act has yet to be appropriated by Congress, states expect that some funding will be appropriated in early 2009. This is particularly likely given that Vice President Biden was one of the Act’s chief architects and President Obama has previously articulated a commitment to seeing the Act funded.
Although the Second Chance Act may represent one possible avenue of channeling more money for transitional jobs programs to the states, another option – that is both potentially more powerful and more speculative – may soon become a possibility.
Although the $330 million that Congress has authorized to fund the Second Chance Act over the next two years is a significant sum of money, it pales in comparison to the figures that have been suggested with respect to a potential Public Works Plan that President Obama may shortly unveil.
Obama has repeatedly articulated his commitment to launching a substantial government spending program aimed at lifting the economy out of recession. Although only preliminary details of his plan have emerged so far, it proposes to launch the largest public works program since President Dwight Eisenhower’s creation of the federal highway system in the 1950’s.
Democratic leaders in congress, governors, and some economists have estimated that upwards of $400 billion, and potentially as much as $1 trillion, could be invested in such a plan. A national public works program may provide an ideal framework in which state eligibility for certain funds could be tied to the creation of transitional public works jobs for individuals exiting prisons.
A transitional public works program would offer ex-offenders a powerful opportunity to help rebuild America, earn a living, increase their prospects for long-term employment, and reestablish themselves in the outside world as productive, law-abiding members of society.
CONCLUSION
Reforming American correctional policy will prove challenging. The alternative, however, represents a position that has become morally, politically, and fiscally untenable: Allow our current policies to stand, build more prisons, incarcerate more people, and trust that our commitment to tough-on-crime rhetoric will carry the day.
Over the past few years, the folly of such thinking has become increasingly clear. A number of proposals to address the post-incarceration crisis have taken the form of calls for more prison work programs, greater financial incentives for employers who hire ex-offenders, or greater protection under the Equal Protection Clause and an updated regime of employment discrimination laws.
Although I believe that all of these proposals deserve consideration, they all suffer from one fundamental flaw: none of them focuses primarily on increasing the human capital of individuals who are currently incarcerated. The reforms that I have suggested in this note focus on facilitating such an increase.
They provide for a national mandate that will require prisoners obtain basic literacy, facilitate the process of earning a GED, and allow academically advanced inmates to purse college coursework. They require state departments of corrections to adopt the identification provisions for exiting prisoners as articulated in the Second Chance Act, thereby removing an unnecessary obstacle to successful reentry. Finally, these reforms would make it possible for all exiting prisoners to participate in a transitional jobs program, funded through existing grant sources, the Second Chance Act, or a new public works program.
By making a commitment to building the human capital of incarcerated individuals, in prison, at release, and upon reentry to their communities, we take a profound step toward dismantling what has become a carceral state, and moving toward the creation of a correctional system that prizes rehabilitation as much as, and hopefully more so, than punishment.