Partnering with nonprofit, volunteer, and community service organizations to provide work experience to prisoners can produce many of the benefits that similar partnerships bring to job skills programming. For people in prison or jail, relationships with these organizations can provide both meaningful work experiences during their incarceration and a foothold of civic support (or even employment) in the community after release. Another advantage to placing people who are incarcerated in nonprofit sector work programs is that it allows corrections officials to avoid displacing unemployed workers outside of the correctional facility with lower wage, incarcerated workers. Further, the work itself gives prisoners a chance to benefit the community. Thus, like partnering with private companies that cannot fill labor demand, partnering with nonprofit public agencies and community service organizations can provide people in prison or jail with meaningful work experience without incurring public opposition.

Example: California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Los Angeles County Fire Department, and California Department of Correction

More than half of California's 3,800 time wildland firefighters are prisoners inmates living in "conservation camps." Participants earn $1.45 per day working on civic projects, and $1 per hour for responding to emergencies, as they work off sentences for nonviolent crimes such as theft and drug possession. The program has 4,100 people in 38 conservation camps: 33 operated by the state Department of Forestry, five by Los Angeles County. Three of the camps-two state and one county-are for women.

In some instances, work with community-based organizations may be assigned through a work-release program, where program participants actually leave the correctional facility during the work day. In most instances, however, work-release programming is limited to individuals who are close to their release date. (See Policy Statement 22, Workforce Development and the Transition Plan, for more on work release.)