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Experiment Will Test the Effectiveness of Post-Prison Employment Programs |
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From New York Times: Jimmy Parker works at a recycling plant in Chicago through a program that provides jobs for former prisoners. Noisy, dusty and smelly, paying $6.50 an hour, the jobs yield neither the swagger nor the swag that these men and women chased as drug dealers, thieves or worse. But many of them see the temporary work as a fresh start. The jobs are arranged by a Chicago charity, the Safer Foundation, which works with current and former prisoners. Offering transitional jobs like these --- immediate, closely supervised work and help finding permanent employment --- is a growing tactic in the effort to usher felons back to society and curb recidivism. Now the effectiveness of this approach is about to be tested scientifically for the first time. Starting in January, the employment and recidivism rates of 2,000 newly released male prisoners, all with similar histories of little work and poor schooling, will be studied in Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Chicago. Half of the men will receive more limited aid: instruction in work behavior, résumé preparation and other employment skills and help looking for a job. The other half will get those services and also a few months of temporary work in places like the recycling plant here --- a chance for them to get into the unfamiliar rhythms of a regular job. The experiment, which will track the two groups over three years, is being sponsored by the Joyce Foundation in Chicago and directed by the Manpower Development Research Corporation in New York, which specializes in scientific studies of poverty programs.
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