Employment Services

Using Supported Employment to Help People with Behavioral Health Needs Reentering Communities

The ability to find and secure employment, particularly with a livable wage, is one of the most critical aspects to helping people lead safe and healthy lives. Unfortunately, many people leaving prison and jail face barriers and stigmas associated with their incarceration that prevent them from obtaining employment. Supported employment services, customized for people with behavioral health needs, can help address these challenges and provide the assistance needed for people with behavioral health conditions to obtain and sustain gainful employment as they reenter communities. This brief highlights four ways that reentry and community supervision programs can use supported employment services to prepare people with behavioral health needs for successful reentry.

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.

The Hidden Costs of Reentry: Understanding the Barriers to Removing a Criminal Record

NIJ hosted a webinar to discuss under-researched aspects of reentry: expungement of criminal records and the impact of those records. This webinar includes a presentation of ongoing research projects examining the impact of legal aid for expungement and past research projects studying the accuracy and permanency of criminal records and the prevalence of collateral consequences of conviction. A Q&A session will conclude this webinar. Video Run Time: 1 hr., 29 mins.

Providing Services in a Jail-Based American Job Center

This issue brief series explores lessons from the evaluation of the Employment and Training Administration’s Linking to Employment Activities Prerelease (LEAP) grants, funded by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Chief Evaluation Office. LEAP pilots the creation of jail-based American Job Centers (AJCs) to support the successful reentry of participants and directly link them to community-based AJCs upon release. The evaluation looks at approaches to providing services before and after incarceration across 20 sites based on site visits, phone interviews, focus groups, and grantee performance reports.