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Criminal Justice

Over the past several years, policymakers have increasingly focused on the daunting problems facing the more than 600,000 people who are released from prison each year and reenter their communities. Successful transitions are rare — two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested, and half are reincarcerated within three years.

MDRC’s first project in 1974, the National Supported Work Demonstration, targeted ex-prisoners (and three other groups). In recent years, we have begun to build a new body of work studying employment-focused programs for adults and youth in the criminal and juvenile justice systems.

As part of the federally funded Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ project, MDRC, in collaboration with the Urban Institute, is conducting a large-scale random assignment evaluation of the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), one of the nation’s largest and most highly regarded employment programs for recently released ex-prisoners. CEO uses an innovative transitional employment model that is also being tested in a four-site random assignment evaluation funded by the Joyce Foundation, the Transitional Jobs Reentry Demonstration. Finally, MDRC is a subcontractor to Social Policy Research Associates in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Reintegration of Ex-Prisoners Random Assignment Evaluation, which is testing the effectiveness of a group of employment-oriented programs for former prisoners that have received funding from the Departments of Labor and Justice for the past several years.


Key Documents on Criminal Justice

The Joyce Foundation’s Transitional Jobs Reentry Demonstration
Testing Strategies to Help Former Prisoners Find and Keep Jobs and Stay Out of Prison
Listed: July 2009

Transitional Jobs for Ex-Prisoners
Early Impacts from a Random Assignment Evaluation of the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) Prisoner Reentry Program
Working Paper
Listed: December 2007

Employment-Focused Programs for Ex-Prisoners
What Have We Learned, What Are We Learning, and Where Should We Go from Here?
Working Paper
Listed: July 2006

The Power of Work
The Center for Employment Opportunities
Comprehensive Prisoner Reentry Program
Listed: April 2006

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