By Tamara Ryan and Cole Anderson   

Upon release, formerly incarcerated people often have few resources to get by while they are seeking employment. They struggle to find work because of criminal stigma, low education levels, and work history gaps. Supporting formerly incarcerated individuals upon their re-entry helps ensure they can take part in the activities needed for employment, such as resume preparation and learning job search skills. One key to improving the likelihood of employment post-incarceration is to ensure returning citizens have adequate financial resources and support to address their immediate needs and allow a focus on gaining employment. Moving more formerly incarcerated people into the workforce presents a massive opportunity for the state. Not having these individuals in the workforce is a lost opportunity for both employers and the state and increases the likelihood they will return to prison or will be rearrested, adding to the cost burden for the state. Key Findings • Formerly incarcerated people are 24% less likely to return to prison when they have acquired new skills and maintained employment during incarceration. • An estimated 6,000 individuals are released from Colorado prisons annually, a number that is roughly equivalent to 20% of the new entrants that are added to the state workforce each year. This number is also 1.5 times larger than Cherry Creek High School, the largest high school in the Denver area. • Breakthrough, a Colorado nonprofit that works with formerly incarcerated individuals, has helped those citizens achieve a 94% employment rate after their release. If Breakthrough’s results could be replicated for all applicable individuals exiting prison, 2,400 more individuals would be employed among each annual prison release cohort. Together those 2,400 individuals would contribute to GDP growth totaling more than $1 billion and a $650 million increase in personal income.  • Colorado’s current 3-year recidivism rate is 28%. Reducing that rate to Breakthrough’s 6% rate would save the state an estimated $55 million annually in recidivism-related costs, realized after the three-year recidivism measurement period. • Inmates working in Colorado’s prisons earn just dollars per day.i Marginally increasing the income inmates can earn while working in prison and on work release programs could help reduce the financial burden to the state through decreased public benefit use and lower recidivism rates. • There is a strong connection between employment and lasting economic benefits for formerly incarcerated individuals. • Colorado currently lacks any data to capture the outcomes, particularly the employment and earnings outcomes, of former inmates. This deficit makes it difficult to gauge the success of post-release programs. • Over the 5-year period prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half of those who recidivated went back to prison because of technical violations such as possessing a firearm or failing to report to a parole officer, not commission of new crimes.  Employment for Returning Citizens Employment is a critical component of successful re-entry into the community after release from incarceration. A study by the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government found a lack of employment was one of the most significant risk factors affecting successful re-entry.ii Researchers also found community organizations that offer returning citizens assistance with employment were most successful when they provided a holistic approach that included both training and job placement and emphasized high quality jobs with upward mobility potential. Positive benefits of employment include decreased reliance on state assistance, increased self-esteem, a more positive sense of identity, and a life made more stable because of income. Employers also benefit from successful reentry. Hiring formerly incarcerated individuals expands hiring pools at a time when businesses report difficulty finding talent, provides evidence of nondiscriminatory hiring practices, and creates potential tax credit and free bonding service opportunities. Additionally, employers could reduce training costs by hiring individuals who received training while incarcerated. Unfortunately, research shows a felony conviction or incarceration makes individuals significantly less employable. After release, finding a job can take six months or more.iii Providing resources for released individuals to get and keep a job decreases the risk of recidivism because it ensures these citizens are meeting the requirements of parole, contributing to their households, paying off fines or making restitution, and forming the prosocial connections that discourage re-offending. National data shows more than 27% of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed, a number that is higher than the U.S. unemployment rate at any time in history, including the Great Depression. Unemployment is worse for women than men, particularly for formerly incarcerated black women, whose unemployment rate is 43.6%.iv There is a clear connection between unemployment and likelihood to engage in crime. One study found that, among unemployed men in their 30s, more than half had been arrested or convicted of a crime. Additionally, it is important to remember the unemployment rate only measures people who are actively looking for work and does not include discouraged workers who have stopped looking for jobs. When these individuals are included in the calculation, the jobless rate reaches closer to 60%.

Greenwood Village, CO: Common Sense Institute, 2025. 18p.

By Sophie Shanshory

For individuals on probation and those reentering their communities after incarceration, finding employment is often one of multiple challenges. It can be overwhelming to think about finding and maintaining a job when concerns on an individual’s mind might be How will I get there? What if they find out about my record? Will I make enough money to support myself and my family? Employment is an important factor in reentry but getting to a place where the focus can be on a job, education, or a career requires support in other parts of life as well. In the workforce development field, supportive services are used to respond to a range of needs, encompassing those directly related to and outside of work. These services are considered an important complement to employment-focused services provided through local workforce development systems.

The Los Angeles County Innovative Employment Solutions Program (INVEST) is designed to address the complex range of employment and supportive service needs individuals may have and support them in pursuing their employment and career goals. MDRC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social research organization, is studying INVEST along with several other Los Angeles County–based, criminal legal system and reentry-focused programs. INVEST takes an innovative approach to providing employment and supportive services to people on probation in Los Angeles County. The program prepares staff members to understand the unique needs and challenges of people on probation while at the same time using a flexible spending approach that allows for comprehensive service provision.

New York: MDRC, 2023. 12p.

By James Bargent, et al

Over the last five years, Ecuador has been engulfed in violence and a criminal chaos unprecedented in its modern history. The roots of this security crisis can be traced directly to the country’s prison system and the criminal networks that have evolved inside of it. Shaped by a series of failed reforms and the state’s negligence, corruption, and incapacity, the prisons provided a space for these groups, known in Ecuador simply as “mafias,” to take root and grow. More than that, they also provided an economic base for this growth in the form of multi-million-dollar criminal markets that have turned the prisons into one of the most lucrative criminal economies in Ecuador.

Fueled by these profits, the mafias leveraged the opportunity the prisons provided to make connections to gangs on the streets, facilitating their territorial expansion on the outside, and granting them access to the upper echelons of organized crime, including the booming transnational cocaine trade. Competition to control strategic territories and criminal economies between these mafias have driven soaring murder rates on the streets and a series of prison massacres that have claimed hundreds of lives. These criminal networks have also destabilized the country’s democracy with terror-style tactics and political violence. The security crisis stemming from the prisons has provoked a hard-line response from Ecuador’s government, which declared an “internal armed conflict” with “terrorist” groups and deployed the military to the prisons and the streets. While this has disrupted some mafia operations, there has been little sign of any strategy to tackle the systemic failures that led to their rise. And there are signs that both the mafias and corruption networks are reconstituting and setting the stage for a new cycle of violence and criminal activity. Major Findings

▶ Ecuador’s prisons became the epicenter of organized crime because of years of government failures and half-measures. To begin with, hard-line anti-drug laws filled the prisons beyond capacity. The state’s subsequent struggles to control the overcrowded facilities created vacuums in authority, which were filled by corruption networks and criminal gangs. And, after the construction of a series of “mega-prisons” failed to control the internal chaos, the government slashed the operational budget and dismantled the ministry responsible for running it, providing the catalyst for the total criminal takeover of the system.

▶ The concentration of the population in the mega-prisons increased the profits from internal rackets. This converted the penitentiary system into a multimillion dollar criminal economy based on exploiting the lack of state control and the failure to provide basic services. These markets are run both by gangs and extensive corruption networks, which may work with the gangs or independently. The profits from this economy drove the evolution and expansion of the prison mafias, while providing a powerful incentive for corrupt actors to undermine attempts at reform.

▶ The prison mafias grew quickly by recruiting bands of small-time criminals and youth gangs in the prisons and integrating them into federations of semi-autonomous criminal structures operating both in the prisons and on the streets. The mafia leaders were then able to put these networks at the service of criminal elites. This created a unique role for them, coordinating and connecting the different levels of organized crime.

▶ Through this process, the prison mafias have established themselves as important links in the transnational cocaine supply chain. However, for the most part, they remain at the operational level of trafficking, providing logistical and security services to Mexican, Colombian, European, and individual Ecuadorian drug traffickers.

▶ The ceding of the prisons to the mafias, the growth of the criminal economies that fund them, and the opportunities to access the transnational drug trade led to criminal competition that fuelled high levels of violence inside and outside the prison system that has been difficult to control. The catalyst for this rise in violence was the power vacuum left by the murder of Choneros leader Jorge Luis Zambrano, alias “Rasquiña” or “JL,” who had previously limited competition by integrating numerous criminal interests and powers into a single network held together by his individual authority.

▶ While the military intervention in the prisons in 2024 disrupted the mafia’s capacity to operate freely, the evident lack of mid- and long-term strategies to tackle the systemic issues at the heart of the prison crisis or dismantle the prison business makes it highly likely organized crime and corruption networks will reestablish operations within the prisons. Furthermore, the weakening of leadership ties between the prisons and the streets has accelerated a trend towards the atomization of the mafias, leading to increased territorial disputes and predatory criminal activities outside the prisons, principally affecting Ecuador’s most economically deprived and marginalized communities.

Washington, DC: Insight Crime, 2024. 76p.