Mentoring Formerly Incarcerated Adults: Insights from the Ready4Work Reentry Initiative

This report explores mentoring as a tool for supporting the successful reintegration of formerly incarcerated individuals within the context of a larger reentry strategy -- in this case, the Ready4Workmodel. Ready4Work was a three-year national demonstration designed to address the needs of the growing ex-prisoner population and to test the capacity of community- and faith-based organizations to meet those needs. This report describes Ready4Work's mentoring component; it examines the extent to which mentoring was attractive to participants, the types of adults who volunteered to serve as mentors and how receipt of mentoring was related to participants' outcomes, including program retention, job placement, and recidivism. While this research was not designed to assess the precise impact of mentoring on formerly incarcerated adults, it provides a first look at how mentoring, or supportive relationships more broadly, can fit into comprehensive reentry efforts.