The following is shared from Investigate West:
Thomas Van Hoose had been here before. Nearing the end of his third stint in an Oregon correctional facility on drug charges, he was thinking about what life on the outside would be like yet again.
His first two times exiting prison went about the same way: He got a minimum-wage job, but soon found himself sinking under the weight of the intractable costs of living — rent, utilities, food, child support — that his meager paycheck could not cover.
“I could pay rent, but I can’t pay for utilities, or I can pay the utilities, but food is short. Something like that is always going on,” he recalled. “Once it gets to that point, I start supplementing my income, and in general, that leads me back to drugs.”
Van Hoose, 50, was determined to do it differently ahead of his release in May from Deer Ridge Correctional Institution outside Madras, a city in Central Oregon. This time, he sought assistance from a novel workforce development program inside the prison that put him on track to find good-paying work about six months after he was released.
The program — called WorkSource Oregon Reentry — helped him make a resume, connect with potential employers and map out career goals while still incarcerated. Once released, staff paid the nearly $6,000 in training and licensing fees he needed to secure a job as a truck driver. He now works for Swift Steel, a pipe supplier in Redmond, a city about half an hour south of Madras.
“This is the first time that anybody’s come in and seemed to care,” Van Hoose said. “This program has been my light at the end of the tunnel.”
Launched in 2022 as a partnership between one of Oregon’s local labor development boards and state agencies, the WorkSource Oregon Reentry program provides comprehensive career services to incarcerated adults both as they prepare to leave prison and after release with the goal of steering people towards meaningful employment.
While still incarcerated, participants are able to develop the soft skills needed to find employment — like interviewing, finding job listings and workplace communication. Then, once back outside, WorkSource directs people to open positions they could be a fit for and finances the cost of necessities to work, like gas and licensure, among other things. It’s one of just a handful of workforce programs in state-run prisons and among the first in the U.S. to expand statewide.
But the program could start to wind down by as early as next spring, after Oregon lawmakers failed this summer to pass a bill that would have allocated $3 million to maintain its operations for the next two years. Up until now, the program has been sustained by roughly $5 million in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Labor and a one-time state workforce investment package passed by the Oregon Legislature in 2022 — dollars that will run out next year.