Program Highlight | Spring 2007
Employment-Focused Programs for Ex-Prisoners
On February 14, 2007, one of the coldest days of the year in New York City, students of ISERP's Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (QMSS) program and other Columbia departments were not dissuaded by the weather and attended an event with Dan Bloom from the MRDC about employment-focused programs for ex-prisoners. Far from being frozen, students' brains were avidly engaged in the presentation, which quickly turned into a dynamic exchange. Obviously, Dan Bloom's topic fascinated the audience: How do we design employment programs to effectively help ex-prisoners reintegrate into society?
Over the last 30 years, MRDC, a non-profit, non-partisan education and social policy research organization based in Manhattan, has been building knowledge for improving social policies by studying programs outcomes and impact, disseminating information and fostering its use by policymakers.
With profound consequences for public safety, state budget, and the well-being of urban neighborhoods, reentry of ex-prisoners and recidivism are recognized as major policy issues-particularly with more than half a million people being released from prison each year. Previous studies have analyzed the factors related to recidivism. From these, we know that difficulties in finding steady employment due to prison records often contribute to the failures of reentry and reintegration. Yet the design of employment programs is a delicate issue, since measures such as tax credits to employers or salary compensation, which could support to ex-prisoners' economic reintegration, can be perceived as unfair by regular citizens facing low wages and employment difficulties.
MRDC's work then attempts to fill this gap of knowledge about effective employment-based reintegration programs by evaluating not only the outcomes of these programs but, above all, their impact. Many challenges face such evaluation studies: creating comparison groups is very difficult due to the heterogeneity of the targeted population; individual motivation plays a great role, but is difficult to measure; and random assignment is not often feasible, whereas sample size is rarely large enough to achieve statistical significance.
Through a federally-funded program called the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), MRDC and the Urban Institute are following groups of ex-prisoners enrolled in a program supporting them on a work site and trying to rehabilitate them until they are ready to enter the regular job market. In parallel, MRDC studies a limited job search program targeting similar groups of ex-prisoners enrolling with the same motivation. After almost three years, MRDC will be able in a few months to deliver the results of this study based on administrative records and surveys comparing the outcomes and impact of both programs. By doing so, some key unsolved questions related to the role of motivation or the relationship between low wage and recidivism, will finally find an answer.
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