Tuck School of Business | ESG-Focused First-Year Projects Provide Consulting with Impact

The United States government spends approximately $85 billion each year on prisons and jails, yet half of the people released from prisons are reincarcerated within three years. To many academics, this represents an intractable challenge—but to Kakeru Tsubota T’23 and his FYP team, it also demonstrated a market failure.

Tsubota and his teammates, Addie Bodell, Elyse Curtis, Jordan Figueroa, and Margaux Richman, partnered with Dream Corps, a California-based nonprofit working toward criminal justice reform. Dream Corps had already identified on-the-ground supporters for new approaches in the state but needed a strategic framework to focus those efforts and create a sustainable program they could duplicate in other states. 

The team, which had little background knowledge of the prison industry, spent the first two weeks fact-finding and talking to stakeholders. Working closely with Ruby Welch, an expert on the incarceration cycle in Arkansas, they defined what Tsubota calls the “customer journey” of newly released inmates.

“You have three steps to consider,” he says. “The first two days are critical. You don’t have cash, transportation, or housing. Unless you can find support within those two days, you are likely to end up back in prison. Then you have two weeks in which you need to find a job. You not only need a resume but also an explanation of your time in prison. Then you have the continuing process of parole and readjusting to life.” 

While numerous programs address different aspects of the transition, Tsubota explains, it largely fell to individual advocates like Welch to connect inmates with a patchwork of resources. “Our challenge was to provide wraparound services that are not dependent on a single person,” he says. 

After a visit to Arkansas to see the problem firsthand, the team arrived at a structured peer support model, in which formerly incarcerated mentors would be trained and paid to work with newly released inmates to provide logistical and personal support. 

As a final deliverable, the team developed a pitch deck outlining the specifics of a program that Dream Corps could implement and scale. They designed a minimum viable product, a 36-month ramp-up plan, identified KPIs, and suggested possible funding sources, including government grants and corporate sponsors. Dream Corps, Tsubota reports, is exploring the next steps needed to bring the program to life. The project will also live on at Tuck, where Clinical Professor Hanne Pico Larsen is writing a case based on the work.