Justice-involved individuals have a high prevalence of mental health, substance use, and chronic health conditions. Connecting those individuals to health services during reentry could help improve their health and lower their risk of recidivism. This Urban Institute brief highlights how New York and Rhode Island have used Medicaid Health Homes to ensure that returning citizens have access to health care as they transition back into the community. Lessons learned from both states include the need for pre-release discharge planning so participants are immediately connected to health services upon release, and the value of having a liaison bridge the gap between the justice and health systems. Both states also needed creativity and commitment at the state level to fund the health home model, as well as formal structures for communication and collaboration across systems.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation developed this report to study the impact of couples-based family strengthening services for incarcerated fathers and their families. The Office of Family Assistance funded 12 grantees to support healthy relationship programming for incarcerated fathers, their partners, and their families from 2006-2011, and this report focuses on the findings from four of those programs. Three out of four of the healthy relationship programs had weak and non-significant finds, but one program showed sustained positive effects on multiple relationship and parenting outcomes. The authors suggest that more robust and comprehensive interventions might be necessary for justice-involved families.

There are seven million or more working-age men in the United States who are not engaged in the workforce, and a variety of causes for this situation have been suggested. In this publication from the American Enterprise Institute, the authors address several of potential causes for the decline in work activity among these men and discuss policies that could be used to address the issues. The publication also recommends a focus on men with severe barriers to work, such as those with criminal histories or substance abuse issues and men who are noncustodial parents.

Girls and women who are at risk for justice system involvement or who are justice system involved have different pathways to involvement and different risk factors, so gender-responsive programs have been targeting services to girls and women who are at risk for entering the typically male-dominated system. In this brief, MDRC examines results from their evaluation of the PACE Center for Girls program in Florida to explain how gender-responsive principles work in practice. Components of gender-responsive programs, such as a strengths-based approach, are discussed, and experiences of girls in the program are shared.

In this brief from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, strategies used by Responsible Fatherhood reentry programs to enhance the fathers’ parenting skills are discussed, such as building knowledge of child development, increasing communication, and providing assistance with child support. Also included are recommendations for practitioners who offer responsible parenting services to reentry populations.

This study from the Aspen Institute explores how justice-involved women experience family relationships. The researchers conducted interviews and focus groups with women enrolled in College and Community Fellowship, a program that helps justice-involved women successfully complete their college education. These interviews showed the pivotal role that social capital, in the form of family support, plays in enabling these women to complete college. Furthermore, as justice-involved women complete education, they become important sources of social capital within their communities. The authors pose several recommendations to help cultivate social capital among women with convictions.

This report presents interim impact and implementation findings of seven transitional jobs programs from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Enhanced Transitional Jobs Demonstration. Two of the sites in that study — in Atlanta and San Francisco — are also a part of ACF’s Subsidized and Transitional Employment Demonstration. The two studies closely coordinated beyond the shared sites, including shared reports, common data collection instruments, and other ongoing collaboration.

The report shares early results in the areas of implementation, employment outcomes, recidivism, and child support payment.

Early results include:

• The Enhanced Transitional Jobs Demonstration programs were relatively well implemented.
• All but one of the programs generated large increases in employment in the early months of follow-up; however, these increases were mostly or entirely the result of the transitional jobs and faded as participants left those jobs.
• Two of the three programs targeting people recently released from prison appear to have reduced recidivism.
• Most programs increased payment of child support. (Author abstract)

With a total of 2.2 million incarcerated people in the United States, a collateral cost seems to be low levels of educational attainment. Among state prisoners, the average level of education is 10.4 years of schooling; similarly, over two-thirds of this population lack a high school diploma. This report from CLASP presents suggestions to improve training during and after incarceration that aim to increase educational and employment opportunities of reentering citizens.

The National Hire Network Clearinghouse provides contact information for state-specific government agencies and community-based organizations that can assist people who have criminal records. Assistance may include providing job-related and legal services, answering questions from individuals with criminal records, or offering referrals to other useful organizations.

The U.S. incarceration rate remains exceptionally high, especially for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, and the incidence of involvement in child protective services (CPS) is also quite high among disadvantaged groups. This confluence of incarceration and CPS involvement may have various impacts for parents, children, and families as a whole. The authors of this Institute for Research on Poverty brief examined data from Wisconsin to demonstrate and describe the overlap between parental incarceration and child CPS involvement, as well as between adolescent CPS involvement and later incarceration in young adulthood.