Reentry and vocational training programs are also effective. Consider, for instance, EMPLOY, a prisoner reentry employment program run by the Minnesota Department of Corrections, which has been shown to decrease recidivism and increase employment for program participants. The program, which participants begin within the final few months of their prison term and conclude one year after their release, reduced the likelihood of reincarceration for a new crime by 55% and increased the likelihood of securing employment within a year of release by 72%. Or take the case of the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program, a federal initiative that allows private industries to employ individuals in prison in realistic work environments and helps them acquire marketable skills, all while being paid prevailing local wages for that line of work. The program not only reduces recidivism but also helps incarcerated individuals accrue savings and payoff any money owed for victim cornpensation.
Vocational training programs such as these are critical because individuals are more likely to commit new crimes if they remain unemployed upon release, and employment is hard to come by for formerly incarcerated people. One study of post-release employment outcomes among individuals in Indiana found that, of the more than 6,000 people tracked, roughly 94% remained unemployed nine months following their release, and 78% of these same individuals remained unemployed even five years later.
Drug treatment programs have also been found to reduce both recidivism and relapse into drug abuse. A 2012 meta-analysis of 74 studies evaluating incarceration-based drug treatment programs over the past 30 years found that, on average, participants in a treatment program had a 15% to I7% reduced likelihood of both recidivism and relapse. And some incarceration-based treatment programs exceed those average results. Participants in the Forever Free Substance Abuse Treatment Program at the California Institution for Women in Frontera, for example, had a 20% reduced likelihood of recidivating compared to similarly situated nonparticipants, enjoyed a I6% increased likelihood of employment, were 26% less likely to have reported drug use in the year since their release, and had a greater likelihood of living independently and maintaining custody of their children.
Unfortunately, prison programs are woefully underfunded .and do not come close to meeting the needs of those who are incarcerated. Indeed, the percentage of individuals participating in vocational, educational, and drug treatment programs declined in the 1990s while incarceration rates were going through the roof, demonstrating that jurisdictions were investing in longer sentences but not the programming that would ultimately bring public safety benefits when these individuals were released. One study of prison programming in seven states found that less than 10% of the people who were incarcerated took part in educational, employment, or vocational programming.
To be sure, many people in prison are participating in a work program, but the majority are performing jobs to support the functioning of the prison, such as food preparation or janitorial work, which impart few marketable skills and do not improve the person's employment prospects upon release. The vocational training that works best to help individuals when they leave prison is in short supply. For example, UNICOR, the vocational program run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons which affords participants experience in carpentry, electronics, automotive repair, and other marketable trades, has a waiting list of 25,000 people and a meager 8% participation rate, despite the fact that participating in UNlCOR reduces recidivism by 24%.
Education offerings in prison similarly fall well short of reaching all the needs of those in prison. An estimated 40% of people in state and federal prisons have neither a high school diploma nor a GED, but many of these individuals need more than a GED-prep course, which tends to be the standard offering in facilities. More than 20% of state and federal prisoners and more than 30% of people in jail have at least one "cognitive disability" (examples of which include autism, learning disorders, attention deficit disorder, Down syndrome, and dementia), compared to just 5% of the general population. Few facilities offer any kind of educational programming tailored to the needs of these individuals. Prisons also rarely offer the kind of basic education that many of the people in prison need even when they do not have cognitive disabilities. A recent study of more than 200 individuals in a medium security prison in Alabama, for example, found that among the African American and Latino population in the prison, the average grade level for reading was sixth and third grade, respectively. Yet few facilities offer remedial education for individuals at this reading level. Most pre-GED courses are designed for those who are reading between a sixth- and eighth-grade-level equivalent.
Rachel Barkow " Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration" (2019)
