NIJ has released three white papers that address important challenges in the reentry arena – the payment of fines and fees, securing employment, and access to human services post-release.
Recruitment, Assessment, and Retention in the Direct Care Workforce for Individuals with Criminal Records: A Comprehensive Model Approach
Recruitment, Assessment, and Retention in the Direct Care Workforce for Individuals with Criminal Records: A Comprehensive Model Approach identifies strategies for connecting individuals with criminal records who do not pose an unreasonable risk to public safety to long-term employment in the rapidly growing health care sector.
Demographic shifts are creating a heightened need for direct care workers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts home health aides and personal care aides will continue to be among the fastest-growing occupations. Anticipated worker shortages have prompted national conversations about the potential benefits and considerations involved in hiring individuals with criminal records for the direct care workforce. Linking certain individuals with conviction records to entry-level jobs in this industry could help fill critical shortages, connect this population to employment and potential career paths, and ultimately contribute to successful reintegration and increased public safety.
Child Support and Reentry
Child Support and Reentry focuses on what social scientists and policy analysts have learned about how child support, criminal justice, and reentry are related.
Over the past four decades, the United States has experienced an expansion of the criminal justice system and the public child support system. There are now over two million citizens in U.S. prisons and jails and another five million under correctional supervision. The child support system also has grown to new levels. Over the past 30 years, there has been a tenfold increase in child support debt. The majority of the 5.5 million parents who owe this debt have extremely low incomes. In many respects, developments in these two public arenas are interconnected, with rising imprisonment contributing to rising child support debt and rising child support debt contributing to rising imprisonment. Parents caught in the middle of these trends can find their post-prison reintegration particularly difficult and challenging. Social scientists and researchers have only recently begun to analyze these interconnections. There is now an emergent body of research that addresses how criminal justice and child support work together to shape reentry for this population of parents.
The Role of Human Service Providers During Community Supervision
The Role of Human Service Providers During Community Supervision examines the intersection between community supervision and the human service needs of people on probation, parole, and pretrial release.
One of every 58 American adults is currently under some form of community correctional supervision. People placed on community supervision often have significant human service needs, some of which are addressed through correctional agency resources, but most of which are met, if at all, through community-based human service agencies. This paper summarizes what is known about the human service needs of people on supervision, and catalogs the ways in which various forms of community supervision can operate to either facilitate or impede the meaningful delivery of programs, treatment, and other services to people on probation, parole, and pretrial release. This paper also proposes three keys targets for improving the efficient and effective delivery of human services to people on community supervision.