This report tells how the Ready4Work program, which aims to ease an ex-prisoner’s transition home, added a mentoring component to its suite of reentry support services. Readers will learn how 11 sites packaged this new component, who participated and what initial outcomes say about mentoring’s capacity for impacting the lives of former inmates (hint: it’s all positive — and worthy of a deeper look!).
In Ready4Work, mentoring emerged as a promising approach to help former inmates readjust to society. Mentored participants were twice as likely to get a job compared to their non-mentored counterparts. This group also secured initial employment faster and, once hired, were more likely to stay on the job for at least three months. In addition, participants who met with mentors were 35% less likely to reoffend in the year following their release relative to ex-prisoners who had opted out of the mentoring program.
