In Brief
I S S U E 6 M AY 2 0 0 7
(Update of Issue 4, Published in September 2006)

Ready4Work In Brief
Update on Outcomes; Reentry May Be Critical for States, Cities
By Chelsea Farley and Wendy S. McClanahan
As we publish this issue of P/PV In Brief—featuring
updated findings from the Ready4Work prisoner reentry initiative—states and cities across the country
face unprecedented prison (and prisoner reentry) crises.
After two decades of “get tough on crime” policies,
many prison systems are bursting at the seams, and
state governments are buckling under the weight of
ever-growing incarceration budgets. In 2000, 22 states
and the federal prison system operated at 100 percent
or more of their highest capacity.1 In total, states spend
more than $40 billion per year on prisons—with some
spending more on corrections than higher education.2
Recidivism is a major contributor to these problems.
Nationally, about 650,000 ex-prisoners return to their
communities each year, and two thirds of them are
back behind bars within three years of their release.3
This churning in and out of prison has devastating consequences for the families and communities directly
affected (an estimated 2 million American children
have a parent in jail or state or federal prison4). Returning prisoners are concentrated in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods, where their presence can disrupt
already fragile social structures and where there are few
supports and services to help them reintegrate.
With states facing serious questions about the financial—and social—costs of mass, repeat incarceration,
many see reentry programs as a possible solution.
But what program models hold the most promise for
generating results? Do reentry programs really have
the potential to reduce recidivism and ultimately ease
the burden of overcrowded prisons and overstretched
state budgets?

California
In California, where there are more than 170,000 inmates in a system designed to house 100,000, federal courts recently threatened
a take-over. On May 3, with a court-ordered deadline looming, Gov.
Schwarzenegger and the state legislature agreed on a $7.8 billion
prison reform package focused mainly on building more prisons;
the legislation also called for “reentry centers” and “inmate treatment and prison-to-employment plans,” but it’s unclear exactly
how much funding will be allocated for these efforts or how they
will take shape on the ground. Many critics argue that the legislation fails to address California’s long-term problems—including a
70-percent recidivism rate, among the highest in the nation. Still,
the inclusion of reentry efforts is a significant step forward. The
sheer magnitude of California’s crisis may provide the incentive
to invest in reentry in a new and comprehensive way—and in so
doing, it will be critical that California’s leaders build on lessons
learned from Ready4Work and other previous reentry initiatives.

While much more research is needed to understand the true, long-term impact of prisoner reentry
initiatives, outcomes from the recently completed
Ready4Work demonstration give reason to be optimistic. These outcomes were extremely promising in terms
of education, employment and program retention, with
recidivism rates among Ready4Work participants 34 to
50 percent below the national average.5

What Is Ready4Work?
Funded by the US Departments of Labor and Justice and the Annie E. Casey and Ford foundations,
Ready4Work was a three-year national demonstration
that provided reentry services to almost 5,000 returning prisoners in 17 sites around the country. This brief
describes outcomes data from the 11 adult Ready4Work
sites (six others served juveniles only6), updating findings published in September 2006 in the original
Ready4Work In Brief.

I S S U E 7 M AY 2 0 0 7

What Are the Outcomes?

Research has shown that ex-prisoners who obtain
steady jobs and develop social bonds have much lower
recidivism rates, but many find it difficult to obtain
stable employment and establish positive relationships.7
Thus, Ready4Work aimed to provide support in both
arenas. Services consisted of employment-readiness
training, job placement and intensive case management,
including referrals for housing, health care, drug treatment and other programs. Ready4Work also incorporated a unique mentoring component, the theory being
that mentors may help ease ex-prisoners’ reentry by
providing both emotional and practical support (helping
returnees navigate everyday barriers, such as finding
a place to live, getting a driver’s license or figuring out
how to commute to work).

Mentoring
Ready4Work’s most innovative aspect may be its mentoring component: Few social programs have attempted
to provide adults—much less ex-offenders—with mentors. At the outset, sites were given a choice between
group and one-on-one mentoring.8 Because so little
research had focused on mentoring for adults, it was
unclear which model might be most effective. In the
end, many programs implemented, and many participants received, both types of mentoring.
Just over half of the Ready4Work participants met with
a mentor. Of these, almost 60 percent participated in at
least one month of one-on-one mentoring, while nearly
three quarters reported attending at least one month of
group mentoring. Nearly a third of enrollees participated
in both types of mentoring.

Ready4Work services were delivered via partnerships
among local faith, justice, business and social service
organizations, each headed up by a lead agency. At
six of the sites, the lead agencies were faith-based
organizations; at three other sites, they were secular
nonprofits. Operations in the remaining two cities were
coordinated by a mayor’s office and a for-profit entity.

Program planners had hoped that more enrollees would
participate in the mentoring component of Ready4Work
and that they would meet with their mentors more often
than they typically did (the initiative had an original goal
of matching 90 percent of participants with a mentor).
Our results may simply reflect the reality that adults
returning from prison face competing demands on their
time. It is also worth noting that female Ready4Work
participants were more likely than male participants to
be mentored, perhaps indicating that some men resist
forming a mentoring relationship. Finally, sites reported
more success with the mentoring component as time
went on, which may suggest a learning curve on the
part of staff and volunteers about how to effectively
implement this new program element.

Who Enrolled in Ready4Work?
Ready4Work targeted 18- to 34-year-old, nonviolent, nonsexual felony offenders—individuals with the highest risk
of recidivism—and enrolled them within 90 days of their
release from prison. Participants enrolled voluntarily, which
is important in any consideration of program outcomes
(see discussion on page 3). Ready4Work served a predominantly black male population. With an average age
of 26, the initiative’s participants were younger and more
heavily minority than the overall population of ex-prisoners.
Half of all Ready4Work participants had been arrested
five or more times. A majority had spent more than two
years in prison, and almost 25 percent had spent five or
more years behind bars.

In addition to tracking participation data, we conducted
analyses of how mentoring was correlated with other
outcomes. We found that mentoring was related to program retention and helping them find and keep jobs.
More details on these correlations are provided below.9

Despite these extensive criminal histories, Ready4Work
participants had some advantages when compared
with the larger ex-prisoner population: They had slightly
higher education rates, and more than half had held a
full-time job for a year or longer before entering prison.
At the same time, more than 50 percent of the participants reported earning half or more of their income from
crime the year before they became incarcerated.

Program Retention
Participants in Ready4Work remained engaged in the
program for a significant period of time: a median of
eight months. Only a small proportion left the program
during the first few months, while 30 percent took

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Recidivism

advantage of the full 12 months of services. Based
on our conversations with corrections departments
around the country, many reentry efforts—where they
exist—may only provide services for a short postrelease period (for example, 60 or 90 days). With the
myriad of challenges facing ex-inmates, two to three
months of post-incarceration reentry programming—
without a connection to ongoing community-based
interventions—may be too little to have any meaningful
long-term impact on their lives. The Ready4Work program model provides longer-term support, a factor that
state and city governments may want to consider as
they seek to integrate lessons from this demonstration.

According to state incarceration records, recidivism
rates among participants are considerably lower than
those reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics
(BJS) for a nationally representative population of exoffenders. Just 2.5 percent of Ready4Work participants
returned to state prison with a new offense within
six months of their release (compared with 5 percent
nationally), and only 6.9 percent did so within one year
(compared with 10.4 percent nationally).
We were also able to obtain BJS data on a group of
ex-prisoners more similar to Ready4Work participants—18- to 34-year-old, African American, nonviolent
felons—which provides a more relevant comparison
point. Just 2.9 percent of African American nonviolent
felons participating in Ready4Work returned to state
prison with a new offense within six months, and 7.6
percent did so within one year. These rates are, respectively, 48 and 43 percent lower than those for the subsample of ex-offenders provided by BJS.

Strikingly, participants who received mentoring of any
kind in a given month were 60 percent less likely to leave
the program during the following month than participants
who were not mentored, assuming equality on other
participant characteristics.10 On average, mentored participants remained in the program longer (10 months,
versus 7 months for those who were not mentored).
Because mentoring is voluntary, some of this observed
link undoubtedly reflects participants’ motivation. That
is, participants who were more motivated were both
more likely to be involved in mentoring and more likely
to remain in the program. Nevertheless, the results are
encouraging, because the longer participants remain
engaged in a program, the more likely they are to benefit.

While Ready4Work’s outcomes are very positive when
compared with the BJS data, there are limits to the
conclusions that can be drawn from such comparisons.
The “motivation” factor previously mentioned is certainly
germane to any discussion of recidivism. Furthermore,
our study was not designed to determine if Ready4Work
was the cause of any positive participant outcome.
Because the model was so new, our research was oriented toward implementation questions, most fundamentally: Could a program that combines employment
services, intensive case management and mentoring
for newly released ex-prisoners be successfully implemented by faith- and community-based organizations?
The answer to that question is yes. But more research,
such as a random-assignment evaluation, would be
needed to draw definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of the intervention. Nonetheless, comparing
Ready4Work’s recidivism data to those from BJS does
help us understand how these participants fit into the
larger picture of recidivism among ex-prisoners—and
the results are heartening.

Employment
Ready4Work participants have had success both in finding jobs and remaining employed. Fifty-six percent of all
participants held a job for at least one month while they
remained in the program. More than 60 percent of those
who found a job remained employed for three consecutive months and a third of them for six months or more.
These accomplishments are impressive given the many
barriers to employment these ex-prisoners face.
Mentoring may have played a role in helping these
participants find jobs. Enrollees who took part in oneon-one mentoring were more than twice as likely to find
jobs as participants who had never been mentored.
Mentoring was also associated with helping enrollees
remain employed. As noted above, these findings must
be interpreted cautiously since mentoring and employment are both related to motivation and possibly other
factors as well.

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A Promising Model

Endnotes

Based on these early findings, Ready4Work shows real
promise as a vehicle for helping people returning from
prison forge connections in their communities. Sites
enrolled ex-prisoners with numerous challenges and a
high risk of recidivism, as indicated by their age, race and
criminal backgrounds. They also managed to keep participants engaged in the program for a significant length of
time—a median of eight months. What’s more, a majority
of participants found jobs and many remained employed
for three consecutive months or more. Ready4Work sites
provided about half the participants with mentors, and
those participants have done particularly well in finding
and keeping jobs. Perhaps most striking, Ready4Work
participants had recidivism rates well below the national
average. These findings are certainly positive enough to
warrant further research; for states and cities considering a new, more deliberate approach to prisoner reentry,
Ready4Work may provide guidance about specific program strategies that are worth trying.

1	 Human Rights Watch, Retrieved May, 2007 from
http://hrw.org/prisons/united_states.html
2	 Greenblatt, Alan, “Felon Fallout: Overcrowding and Soaring Corrections Costs Are Pushing Prison Reform to the Top of States’
Policy Agendas.” Governing Magazine, March 2007.
3	 Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1994. Retrieved May 2007 from
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs
4	 Family and Corrections Network, National Resource Center on
Children and Families of the Incarcerated, An Overview of Statistics,
Retrieved May 20, 2007.
5	 The original Ready4Work In Brief provided recidivism data for 8 of
the 11 adult Ready4Work sites; this updated version relies on data
from all 11 sites.
6	 Juvenile Ready4Work is being evaluated by researchers separately.
7	 They often lack a high school education and have work histories
characterized by sporadic employment and low wages. What’s
more, laws in many states prohibit people with a prison record
from obtaining vocational licenses in many sectors, and employers
sometimes refuse to hire convicted felons because of safety and
liability concerns.
8	 In group mentoring, participants come together for group sessions
with a mentor, rather than traditional one-on-one matches.
9	 The mentoring component of Ready4Work will be explored more
fully in a forthcoming P/PV report. There is a short preview of that
report available at www.ppv.org (McClanahan, 2007, Mentoring
Ex-Prisoners in the Ready4Work Reentry Initiative).
10	 Such as age, gender, education, etc.
11	 The Public Safety Performance Project, Pew Charitable Trust, Public Safety, Public Spending, Forecasting America’s Prison Population 2007-2011, February 2007. This excellent resource is available
at www.pewcorrections.org. Aggregate regional numbers (also
from this report) are charted in the graph below.

At an annual price tag of about $4,500 per participant,
programs like Ready4Work cost a fraction of the $13,000
to $45,000 it takes to keep someone in a prison for a
year.11 Promising models for prisoner reentry are available, and investing in them may yield huge dividends, not
just for ex-prisoners themselves, but for states in crisis.

Costs and Prison Populations Soar
Annual Incarceration Cost
Per Inmate
N 2001 N 2005

$ 40,000

Current and Projected
Prison Population