Issue Brief: Workforce Supports for the Reentry Population During the COVID-19 Pandemic
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Key Findings
- Grantees that reported more established partnerships and stronger communication channels with correctional facilities appeared to be better positioned to implement their Pathway Home program during the COVID-19 pandemic, including conducting recruitment, obtaining referrals, and gaining access to the facilities.
- Grantees reported that early release policies at correctional facilities in response to COVID-19 hampered enrollment into the program and participation. Individuals were being released early to reduce overcrowding, making them ineligible for the program or reducing their time in pre-release services. Grantees found it helpful to have a partner who would commit to providing timely information on release dates, such as someone in the correctional facility or the local prosecutor’s office.
- To address COVID-19-related restrictions, Pathway Home grantees and their correctional partners reported an expansion of technology in facilities such as providing participants with tablets and using DocuSign for paperwork, to improve the virtual outreach, intake, and enrollment processes.
- Grantees reported that the strong labor market in 2021 increased the jobs available for participants and employers’ interest in Pathway Home programs (as a source of potential employees), but decreased participant interest related to training and employment services (because jobs were readily available). Grantees had to develop creative approaches to engaging participants, including providing incentives for participating in the program, and using social media to stay in contact with participants after release.
COVID-19 disproportionately impacted U.S. prison populations. As of June 2020, people incarcerated in federal and state prisons had a rate of infection that was over five times that of people in the general public and a death rate that was about 30 percent higher. Factors that may have contributed to these rates were reported to be the lack of social distancing that could not be maintained in correctional facilities and frequent overcrowding. Policymakers attempted to reduce populations in the facilities by decreasing admissions and increasing early releases to mitigate these factors, especially early in the pandemic. As has been found in surveys of reentry providers administered in June 2021, they also tended to restrict access to organizations providing social services inside facilities during the pandemic. These policies limited the ways in which many facility-based services could be delivered to inmates, including participants of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL)-funded Pathway Home grants.
As part of the Pathway Home Evaluation, Mathematica and its partners Social Policy Research Associates (SPR) and the Council of State Governments Justice Center (CSG), contracted by DOL, developed this brief focused on the experience of the first 20 Pathway Home grants awarded in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mathematica and SPR conducted five virtual group discussions with frontline staff and grant managers in December 2021 from 18 of the 20 organizations that received grants in 2020. Mathematica and SPR supplemented these discussions with information from a review of grant applications, a round of phone calls with individual grantees conducted in November 2020 to clarify the information in their grant applications, and data from grantee performance reports as of December 31, 2021. The analysis of these data led to this brief, which details the challenges Pathway Home grantees faced related to COVID-19, how they adapted their programs to these challenges, and how these experiences might inform future programming of the grant activities carried out in a similar context.
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