Related UI Researchers

Publications on Crime/Justice

When youth in the child welfare system face problems such as juvenile delinquency, the agencies charged with their care often find that they do not have the capacity to act without the cooperation of other government departments. The trap gets tighter when parents have lost custody or are in the criminal justice system themselves. Such scenarios frustrate staff in government agencies and cause vulnerable youth to lose confidence in the system just when they need it the most. Child Welfare: The Challenges of Collaboration highlights several scenarios requiring interagency collaboration and also includes an evaluation of Project Confirm, a cross-agency effort to help foster children in juvenile detention. Though the challenges of collaboration will be difficult to solve, this book offers practical examples to guide child welfare service agencies.

Funded by the Departments of Justice, Labor, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) supports innovative reentry programs at the state and community level. As part of this effort, the National Institute of Justice is funding a five-year evaluation of SVORI programs conducted by RTI International and the Urban Institute. This article, published in the August 2006 issue of the Probation and Pretrial Services System Newsletter, outlines the research questions to be addressed by the evaluation as well as the methodologies employed- implementation assessment, impact evaluation, and cost-benefit analysis.

In this brief, we explore the reality of finding employment after prison from the perspective of 740 former male prisoners in Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. Interviews were conducted as part of a comprehensive, longitudinal study entitled Returning Home: Understanding the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry. Eight months after prison, 65 percent of respondents had been employed at some point, but only 45 percent were currently employed. Those who held a job while in prison or participated in job-training programs had better employment outcomes after release. Respondents who were employed and earning higher wages after release were less likely to return to prison the first year out.

This report presents findings from the Multi-site Evaluation of the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI). The results of our initial in-prison interviews with SVORI participants and comparison respondents are included, in addition to an overview of the SVORI programs observed. The report describes the characteristics of the adult male prisoners we interviewed, the services they reported needing, and the services they reported receiving prior to release. Overall, SVORI participants reported receiving more services of a variety of types than members of the comparison group, although there was considerable variation in the levels of services among the sites.

Children of incarcerated parents are often an invisible population, but analyzing and mapping local-level data on these children and their parents can help policymakers and advocates better understand their experiences and needs. This brief discusses the mapping of community data on these families, drawing on the experiences and insights of partners in the Urban Institute’s Reentry Mapping Network (RMN). The brief discusses the value of analyzing and mapping data on children of incarcerated parents, outlines potential data sources, and explores the process of working with and mapping data on this population.