Pathway Home Evaluation Brief: Establishing Grant Programs Inside Correctional Facilities

This implementation brief describes the ways 22 Pathway Home grantees created and implemented new components of pre-release services in correctional facilities beginning in 2021. Pathway Home is a U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) funded grant program that enables service providers to support incarcerated individuals preparing for life after release through a variety of pre-and post-release services. These activities include job preparation, individual development planning, career exploration and planning, counseling, obtaining identification, legal services, comprehensive case management, and skill-building to obtain jobs after release. 

In this brief, grantees share the challenges and solutions associated with establishing programs within correctional facilities. Researchers collected data about the 22 grantees using a review of grant applications, virtual focus groups, a grantee survey, a survey of correctional facility staff, and grantee quarterly reports. Findings in the brief represent the experiences of the 22 grantees who participated in data collection and not the entire Pathway Home program. 

This brief presents information the grantees shared about their experiences developing partnerships, providing services in early phases, including setting up recruitment approaches, case management models, and employment training models. 

(This brief is 9 pages long.)

Grantees reported developing and maintaining strong partnerships with correctional facilities was key to implementing their programs. Areas of strength and challenges to maintaining partnerships include:

• Leveraging existing relationships with correctional agencies is helpful.
• Working with multiple correctional facility partners has challenges, but it necessary.
• Establishing data-sharing processes to with correctional facilities is helpful.
• “Grantees reported…three general types of challenges to building successful partnerships with facility partners. These challenges included staffing changes, program requirements, and restrictions to participants during lockdowns” (p. 5).
• “Despite the challenges of integrating services within correctional facilities, 82 percent of grantee survey respondents (direct grantees and subgrantees) reported providing case management services during prerelease” (p. 7).
• “Two grantees reported that their early experiences of implementing pre-release case management were affected by their ability to coordinate with correctional facility partners….They encountered “roadblocks” to getting into facilities to implement case management services and developed new strategies to be able to meet with participants. These strategies included providing services virtually and identifying additional facilities that would allow them to meet with participants” (p. 8).
• “Grantees offered a range of employment and training services pre-release with 24 grantees providing job readiness training (86 percent) and 17 grantees providing occupational and vocational skills training (60 percent)” (p. 8).

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2023
• Author(s): Gutierrez, I.; Allmang, S.; Jayagoda, M.; and Yañez, A.
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Burak Yuksel
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies