Research brief: Boosting fathers’ resilience during reentry

Fathers returning from incarceration confront a complex set of challenges to rebuilding stable lives, particularly in securing employment and re-establishing family relationships. Together, these intertwined challenges demonstrate the need for comprehensive reentry support.
 

Osborne’s Pathways to Reentry, Employment, and Parenting (Prepare) program launched in 2016 to meet this need. Serving more than 180 fathers across New York City each year, Prepare supports participants in building economic stability, strengthening parenting and coparenting skills, and reducing behaviors that can result in reincarceration.
 

Unlike traditional workforce programs that focus solely on job readiness and placement, Prepare integrates three evidence-based curricula focused on employment, parenting, and healthy relationships. In recent years, programming has been complemented by training in physical and emotional self-regulation by incorporating the Social Resilience Model, or SRM.

We are pleased to share a new study of Prepare’s impact, developed with research partner Child Trends, which shows that participation in Prepare led to statistically significant improvements in Parent Involvement, and that fathers in SRM-enhanced cohorts reported significantly higher Parenting Self-Efficacy than those who did not receive SRM training.

Read the study here.

Prepare was recently re-funded by the U.S. Administration for Children and Families through 2030, underscoring its demonstrated effectiveness and promise as a model for holistic, evidence-based reentry support.