Transitional jobs program Putting employment‐based reentry programs into context

• Date: 01 November 2011
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2011.00781.x
• Author: Robert Apel
• Published date: 01 November 2011

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

TRANSITIONAL JOBS PROGRAM

Transitional jobs program

Putting employment-based reentry programs

into context

Robert Apel

Rutgers University

Employment is a major point of intervention in an offender’s criminal career, and

employment-based reentry programs have obvious appeal as a policy lever intended

to slow the “revolvingdoor” of prison. Indeed, both President George W. Bush and

President Barack Obama advocated for federal funding of prisoner reentry initiatives that

include employment training provisions—a clear illustration that resolving the employment

challenges faced by ex-prisoners is a decidedly bipartisan issue. The astounding scale

of contemporary prisoner reentry—several hundred thousand individuals leave prisons

annually, not to mention more than one million additional individuals who leave jails—

means that a very large number of individuals will invariably return to the community and

experience difficulty finding and maintaining stable employment. This issue has important

implications from the standpoint of public safety because recidivism studies routinely

find that ex-prisoners who maintain stable employment are significantly less likely to be

rearrested.

Employment is therefore strongly linked with criminal desistance—both theoretically

and empirically. Disappointingly, evaluations of employment-based reentry programs

suggest that they tend to yield minimal impacts on the employment and recidivism prospects

of targeted individuals (see Bushway and Reuter, 2004). Yet the authors of one of the most

recent meta-analyses of employment programs for ex-prisoners lamented the absence of

programs inspired by contemporary thinking regarding the best practices in correctional

intervention (Visher, Winterfield, and Coggeshall, 2005). The unambiguous conclusion

Direct correspondence to Robert Apel, School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, 123 Washington Street,

Newark, NJ 07102 (e-mail: robert.apel@rutgers.edu).

DOI:10.1111/j.1745-9133.2011.00781.x C2011 American Society of Criminology 939

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 10 rIssue 4