This presentation reports on findings from two evaluations of federally-funded prisoner reentry programs that were designed to improve the outcomes of participants and reduce recidivism.  The first program being studied is the U.S. Department of Labor’s Reintegration of Ex-Offenders (RExO) , which provided comprehensive employment-centered services, along with case management and mentoring to formerly incarcerated individuals through 24 community-based grantees, located across the country.  The second program is the Second Chance Act (SCA) Adult Demonstration, funded by U.S. Department of Justice.  The SCA grantees were charged with providing evidence-based, pre- and post-release services such as education, employment assistance health services, substance abuse treatment and housing to individuals identified as medium to high risk of recidivism. Both multi-year evaluations include an implementation study, and a random assignment study.

This presentation will primarily focus on the similarities and differences in the implementation study findings that were previously published as part of both evaluations’ interim reports.  Several aspects of these two programs, in addition to the primary funder, were considerably different from one another, and these differences provide important insights into successes and challenges in designing successful reentry programs. To begin with, RExO grantees were primarily community-based organizations, while SCA grantees were states and local governments.  This difference had important implications for the mindsets and strategies of the grantees in designing and carrying out their initiatives.  For example (and although there are notable exceptions), SCA grantees generally conducted their work in the context of government organizations attempting to ensure compliance with parole conditions, while RExO grantees typically began more naturally with a social services approach to services.  This in turn had implications for the prior backgrounds and experiences of staff who were hired to provide reentry services and had implications for the partnerships that tended to develop and relationships between grantee staff and the probation/parole system. .  The service delivery designs were also different, with the RExO programs focused more ostensibly on employment services, while the SCA grantees focused more on a wide range of health and social services in addition to education and employment services to address criminogenic needs. 

On the other hand, there were important similarities.  For grantees in both programs, case management, involving needs-based service planning and service coordination, tended to be the focal point of project services, even if the types of staff that played this role varied both within and across evaluations. Case managers coordinated the delivery of supportive services and sometimes delivered services directly.  Most of these programs also relied widely on partners for the delivery of services, sometimes through formal agreements with service providers and sometimes through unfunded informal referrals to community agencies.  While, grantees faced numerous challenges in developing strong projects, such as needing substantial ramp-up time, training case managers and coordinating partnerships, they were largely able to overcome these challenges. More fundamentally, many grantees came to embrace substantial changes in the approaches taken in serving this population.