Few New Yorkers face a tougher road to stable employment today than those returning from a period of incarceration. Indeed, the unemployment rate among people who have been to prison is almost five times higher than among the general population. Given these long odds, formerly incarcerated New Yorkers are searching for other ways to generate…

In 2019, the John Jay College Institute for Justice and Opportunity (the Institute) launched a training program to prepare people with lived experience in the criminal legal system for employment and promotions in human services. The Institute believes that workforce and leadership development for people with lived experience in New York City's…

This study delved into the heightened risk of adverse psychosocial outcomes faced by young individuals leaving detention, encompassing challenges such as limited reconnection to education, diminished mental and physical well-being, persistent family difficulties, and social isolation (Altschuler & Armstrong, 1990; Altschuler & Brash, 2004;…

The problem of juvenile delinquency is a social phenomenon that has existed throughout the history of humanity and a social issue that not only affects the growth of the economy and the maintenance of social security and order, but also has a significant impact on the function and role that the family of juvenile offenders play in society. Using…

An increasing age of respondents and cognitive impairment are usual suspects for increasing difficulties in survey interviews and a decreasing data quality. This is why survey researchers tend to label residents in retirement and nursing homes as hard-to-interview and exclude them from most social surveys. In this article, I examine to what extent…

Background: Justice-involved youth report experiencing elevated levels of peer victimization. However, the links between the various forms of peer victimization and specific types of charges are unclear. Objective: The current study advances our understanding of peer victimization among justice-involved youth by examining how experiencing overt…

In 1900, the Westbrook Reformatory for Boys, an institution holding both young people convicted of criminal offences and those deemed to be neglected children, was established in a farming region in Queensland, Australia. The institution would remain in the same location until 1994. By then, it had been rebranded as a Youth Detention Centre,…

The pedagogy of a servicelearning course is applied in a large urban commuter university to explore the impact of a service-learning course on upper-level students. The study population was engaged in an inmate re-entry program, and students were placed in nonprofit re-entry agencies. Results show changes in students' perception of offenders…

We examined whether family care following early-life deprivation buffered the association between stressful life events (SLEs) and executive functioning (EF) in adolescence. In early childhood, 136 institutionally reared children were randomly assigned to foster care or care-as-usual; 72 never-institutionalized children served as a comparison…

This autoethnographic work was written after the author had heard that teaching in the prison environment was challenging and difficult. Although she had previously worked in that environment for five years, she had not read the literature about being a prison educator and the comments made about prison being a difficult place to work were quite…

In 2018, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the results of a nine-year longitudinal study that among 412,731 inmates released in 2005, 84% of them were rearrested. This high recidivism rate shows a clear need for reentry intervention to reduce these rates. A key part of reentry intervention should include career readiness, which helps…

Physical activity during adolescence is critical for disease prevention and health promotion. Studies show that youth who are incarcerated have lower levels of physical activity than their non-incarcerated peers, higher rates of overweight and obesity in adulthood, and worse general health over a lifetime. Sport programming is a promising…

Prisons within the United States contain a large population of inmates with low levels of education. Contributing factors of a successful release from prison have included participation in educational services during incarceration as recidivism rates increase without receiving additional skill sets afforded to inmates. The self-system model of…

Correctional education is a prevalent form of rehabilitation programming for prisoners in the United States. There is limited evidence, however, about the labor market returns to credentials received while incarcerated. Using incarceration, educational, and labor market data in Washington State, we study the labor market returns to GEDs and…

The purpose of this phenomenological inquiry is to understand the experiences of formerly incarcerated Black male students who attend a Northeast urban community college and the unique barriers they encounter while navigating the institution. The United States imprisons more people than any country in the world, and Black men are…