Since employment is highly correlated with successful community reintegration, every person in prison should receive a comprehensive assessment that has vocational and educational components. Corrections departments should consult with local community-based employment service providers to identify and administer assessment tools used in the community that are most appropriate to the particular correctional population. This assessment can then be utilized to determine the type of vocational or educational training that is most compatible with an individual's interests and capacities.

Example: The Workplace (MA)

The Workplace offers employment services to high-risk offenders (participants in the Boston Re-Entry Initiative) who are serving time in the Suffolk County Jail. Within 30 days of an individual's intake, a career counselor stationed at the Suffolk jail conducts a comprehensive educational and vocational assessment, which includes an interview, skills testing, and a compilation of the individual's work and interest history. The career counselor makes recommendations to corrections staff for shaping the individual's service plan, provides one-on-one counseling services, and conducts group workshops.

A substantial number of offenders require employability training in work ethics and values, interviewing, communication skills, teamwork, time management, and other workplace-related soft-skills training. Corrections staff should be prepared to conduct assessments of a person's "readiness for work," while also reviewing work history, skills, and educational attainment.

Documentation of the assessment, and its updates, should be kept on file so that it may be provided to the individual upon release. The results of such assessments can guide programming enrollment and in-prison work assignments, and can serve as a foundation for connecting people to appropriate postrelease employment. (See Policy Statement 22, Workforce Development and the Transition Plan, for more on facilitating such connections.)