Executive Summary
Every year, more than 650,000 men and women leave prison and return to communities across America. With little more than some pocket change and a bus ticket, they reenter society and struggle to find work, housing, a steady social network, and other necessities to successfully transition from a life behind bars to one of freedom.
Upon release, economic barriers, the stigma of a felony conviction, and oftentimes mental health and addiction challenges make reentry a bleak picture for returned citizens. These challenges lead many back to the same patterns and behaviors that sent them to prison in the first place. According to the Department of Justice, more than 40 percent of those released from prison are rearrested in their first year out, 67 percent within three years, and more than three-quarters within five years. Unfortunately, this should come as no surprise, given the lack of quality education, job training, and social capital made available to prisoners while serving time.
Our nation’s revolving prison door and large prison population present a huge cost to taxpayers and families alike. In 2016, 2.3 million individuals are behind bars in the US, and an estimated 7.7 million Americans have been incarcerated at some point in their lifetime. Incarceration costs the US $80 billion a year today, and in Texas, home to the largest state prison population in the nation, taxpayers spent $2.5 billion to incarcerate prisoners in 2015. One recent report found that at least 5.1 million American youth have had at least one parent incarcerated at some point during their childhoods.
To reduce the nation’s prison population, many reform efforts have focused on sentencing practices: reducing or repealing mandatory minimums, particularly for nonviolent drug offenders. While this approach makes sense, it does little to reduce recidivism or increase opportunity for those already in prison. And ignoring what happens to the currently incarcerated and those recently released is problematic, given the crucial time period immediately following a prisoner’s release due to their vulnerability in finding work, housing, and other essentials.
One approach to reducing recidivism and helping the formerly incarcerated reenter society successfully is prison education and reentry programming. Although still a growing field, research on these programs—which range from college and GED courses to vocational, career, high school, and entrepreneurship courses—have demonstrated the ability to reduce recidivism and increase opportunity for those who have served time.
Credit: Pixabay
The Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) has shown an ability to do both. This Texas-based program trains incarcerated men on how to become business entrepreneurs upon their release and then works with them and their families indefinitely after their sentence is over. The program lasts nine months on the inside: a three-month Leadership Academy, focused on character development, and a six-month Business Plan Competition (BPC), during which participants develop their own business proposals and pitch them to program volunteers. Graduates earn a certificate in entrepreneurship from Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business, and once out of prison, they have the potential to earn seed funding from PEP supporters and micro loans.
When PEP men are released, program staff meet them at the gates and help them acquire identification, medical insurance, and basic necessities such as toiletries and clothes for a job interview. PEP also owns transition housing for graduates and assists with finding jobs, complying with parole, and reconnecting men to their families.
PEP’s results are promising. Program graduates reactivate at a rate of just 7 percent, about one-third the recidivism rate for Texas. Within 90 days of their release, 100 percent of all PEP graduates are employed. In 2016, 28 PEP-started businesses project revenues of more than $100,000. Six project revenues of more than $1 million.
PEP’s comprehensive approach and outcomes to date suggest that while education, work, family, community, and housing all matter to help the formerly incarcerated return to society successfully, they must be addressed in tandem to create long-term change. PEP’s model is unique because it does what most programs do not—it connects an in-prison program with services, resources, and a community outside of prison, making participants’ transition home more manageable and less siloed.
Today, there is a growing emphasis on reentry at the local, state, and federal levels. Yet despite the evidence that correctional education and reentry programs can make the return to society a smoother process, effective program models are neither well-known nor extensively discussed.
To help contribute to that dialogue, this paper provides an in-depth look at PEP, offering best practices and a lens through which to view opportunity and reentry for policymakers, advocates, and scholars working to address this critical policy issue.
Introduction
“If there’s a way to do it better . . . find it.” —Thomas Edison
Every year, more than 650,000 men and women leave prison and return to communities across America.1 With little more than some pocket change and a bus ticket, they reenter society and struggle to find work, housing, a steady social network, and other necessities to successfully transition from a life behind bars to one of freedom.
This should come as no surprise, given the lack of quality education, job training, and social capital made available to prisoners while serving time. A lack of education plays a particularly outsized role in this picture, both for incoming and exiting inmate classes. In 2007, almost 1 of every 10 young male high school dropouts was behind bars, compared to 1 of every 33 high school graduates.2 In 2016, 30 percent of all prisoners have less than a high school degree, compared with 14 percent of the broader US population.3 Almost one-third score at the lowest levels of reading proficiency, while more than half score at the lowest levels of numeracy proficiency.4
But because more than 95 percent of prison sentences are for less than life,5 the vast majority of those behind bars are coming home at some point. Economic barriers, the stigma of a felony conviction, and oftentimes mental health and addiction challenges make reentry a bleak picture. Finding work is particularly challenging: survey data suggest that more than half of those released from prison are unemployed a year after their release.6 This inability to find work leads many ex-felons back to the same patterns and behaviors that sent them to prison in the first place. According to the Department of Justice, more than 40 percent of those released from prison are rearrested in their first year out, 67 percent within three years, and more than three-quarters within five years.7
The revolving prison door comes at a high price. In 2016, 2.3 million individuals are behind bars in the US, and an estimated 7.7 million Americans have been incarcerated at some point in their lifetime.8 Incarceration costs the US $80 billion a year9—a national average of approximately $31,000 to incarcerate one individual.10 In Texas, home to the largest state prison population in the nation,11 taxpayers spent $2.5 billion to incarcerate prisoners in 2015.12
But it is not just the monetary costs that today’s criminal justice reformers use as impetus for change. There are also the human costs to families and communities ripped apart by incarceration, which disproportionately impacts low-income communities and communities of color.13 And although men make up the majority of the nation’s prison population, the number of women behind bars has increased 700 percent between 1980 and 2014.14 One report found that at least 5.1 million American youth have had at least one parent incarcerated at some point during their childhoods.15
Many experts trace the uptick in the prison population to the “tough on crime” policies of the 1980s and 1990s. These included mandatory minimum laws, which doled out minimum prison sentences for possession of drugs such as crack cocaine. Other policies shut off funding streams to prison education programs, such as the federal Pell Grant Program, almost overnight. To deter crime, the thinking went, felons should receive long prison sentences with little access to rehabilitation and education. Although Americans once supported using prisons as a means to rehabilitate, survey data show that during the “tough on crime” years, Americans increasingly believed that prisons’ primary purpose was to punish, not rehabilitate.16
On both sides of the aisle, a new line of thinking has been emerging. In recent years, states, which pay the lion’s share of incarceration costs,17 have searched for ways to rein in their bloated prison systems. In an era of hyperpartisanship, the modern criminal justice reform movement has benefited from broad bipartisan goodwill, forging unlikely partnerships in state capitols and Congress alike.
Yet for the most part, policymakers have focused their reform efforts on sentencing practices: reducing or repealing mandatory minimums, particularly for nonviolent drug offenders. While this thinking makes sense, it does little to reduce recidivism18 or increase opportunity for those already in prison.
Ignoring what happens to the currently incarcerated and those recently released is problematic, given the crucial time period immediately following prisoners’ release due to their vulnerability in finding work, housing, and other essentials. A recent Bureau of Justice Statistics study reinforces this point. In 2005, the agency began to follow a cohort of 404,638 former prisoners across 30 states. By the end of their first year out, 43.4 percent of the inmates were rearrested for their first time post-release (see Figure 1). After the second year, only 28.5 percent were rearrested for the first time. The rate of first-time rearrest continued to decrease every year: 20.5 percent after three years, 16.1 percent after four, and only 13.3 percent after five.
As a Congressional Research Service report explains, “The longer released prisoners went without being rearrested, the less likely they were to be rearrested.”19 This suggests that interventions focused on those about to be released and those recently released may offer the greatest promise in reducing repeat crime and recidivism. The potential of antirecidivism measures to prevent crime—rather than merely change how crime is treated in the courts—merits greater attention from policymakers.
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