About the Study
In 2022, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Employment and Training Administration’s Reentry Employment Opportunity (REO) Program to fund Mathematica, Inc. and its subcontractors—RTI and Abt Associates--to conduct the Partners for Reentry Opportunities in Workforce Development (PROWD) Grants Evaluation. The PROWD grants are a first-of-its-kind partnership between DOL and the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Prisons to support states’ provision of employment-related reentry services to people in minimum- and low-security federal prisons, residential reentry centers, and the community. The PROWD grants aim to improve employment outcomes, strengthen communities where grant programs operate, and increase justice and workforce system partnerships.
The PROWD grants evaluation aims to establish foundational knowledge about promising reentry employment programs for people exiting federal prisons, including those pre- and post-release, and develop insights from the early implementation efforts of the PROWD grantees. Optional tasks may build additional evidence about barriers and facilitators to fully implementing the PROWD grants, assess the feasibility of building rigorous evidence of program effectiveness, and potentially assess the overall impact of access to and participation in PROWD services.
This Department of Labor-funded study builds on evaluations of prior DOL reentry efforts, including the Linking to Employment Activities Pre-Release and Pathway Home grants, which focused on incarceration at the state and local levels. The PROWD grants evaluation will help build the evidence base about what works for employment-focused reentry programs serving people exiting federal prisons.
- Foundational fact-finding: What is the existing evidence base on reentry program approaches? What innovative program approaches, components, or features of programs appear to be most promising for scaling based on existing literature and recommendations from the field?
- Early implementation: How were programs implemented during the first year of the grant? To what extent were new systems or partnerships built? What challenges and barriers did grantees face? What are the characteristics of the participants served?
Project Duration: 60 Months
Contract End Date: September 2027
Contractor: Mathematica, Inc
For More Information: ChiefEvaluationOffice@dol.gov
The Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) sponsors independent evaluations and research, primarily conducted by external, third-party contractors in accordance with the Department of Labor Evaluation Policy. CEO’s research development process includes extensive technical review at the design, data collection and analysis stage, including: external contractor review and OMB review and approval of data collection methods and instruments per the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA), Institutional Review Board (IRB) review to ensure studies adhere to the highest ethical standards, review by academic peers (e.g., Technical Working Groups), and inputs from relevant DOL agency and program officials and CEO technical staff. Final reports undergo an additional independent expert technical review and a review for Section 508 compliance prior to publication. The resulting reports represent findings from this independent research and do not represent DOL positions or policies.