Prison Entrepreneurship Program

Established in 2004, the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) pioneered an innovative program that united the nation’s top executives, business owners, and entrepreneurs with convicted felons. Our entrepreneurship boot camp and reentry programs are proven solutions for preventing recidivism, maximizing self-sufficiency, and transforming broken lives.

PEP is not your average reentry program. PEP is a revolution, achieving amazing results with profound impacts. Our work empowers men to reconstruct their identities from tax consumers to taxpayers, gang leaders to servant leaders, felons to community role models.

We are proud of our many accomplishments, including:

• 3,200+ men made the transformational journey from brokenness to healing – pursuing a middle-class life and an opportunity to realize the American dream.
• Our character-based program model has produced industry-leading results with recidivism rates consistently below 9 percent (compared to the Texas 3-year average of 21.4 percent), dropping to approximately 4 percent for those who live in our transitional homes and graduate from our post-release program.
• One hundred percent of our graduates were employed within 90 days of release, with average starting wages of $12 per hour, growing to almost $30 per hour within three years.
• Through training, mentorship, and capital investment, PEP has helped graduates launch more than 500 businesses, including several generating over $1 million in annual gross revenue.
• As validated by Harvard’s Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), our graduates saved Texas taxpayers $4.3 million per year as they became taxpayers themselves and took responsibility for their children, families, and the outcomes of their own lives. Every dollar invested in PEP produces a 794 percent return on investment.

For 18 years, PEP has given incarcerated men in Texas the opportunity to lead successful lives that have an exponential impact on their families and their communities. Because when a man gets out of prison and stays out, that's a win. When his children do not continue an intergenerational cycle of incarceration, that is transformative.