Seeking a Smooth Reentry

New funds and efforts help ex-inmates return to society

Nearly three in four prisoners are addicted to drugs or alcohol. One-quarter of all Americans

infected with HIV and one-third of all with tuberculosis left prison within the last year. As many as half of all men on parole in San Francisco and Los Angeles are homeless. And 16 percent of those imprisoned in state or local jails nationwide are mentally ill.

In response to such needs, a small but growing pool of foundations and charities is putting new money toward an issue that has had a hard time stirring public sympathy: helping recent convicts get on with their lives and avoid returning to jail.

For some charities and grant makers, programs specifically aimed at former prisoners are now being included in broader efforts to overhaul decaying neighborhoods, improve community life, or help needy Americans.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for example, whose mission is to improve health care, has made recent grants to monitor prisoners’ mental health as part of an effort to figure out what impediments they will face in successfully returning to society. The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, which devotes much of its grant making to helping poor families, has given $3.5-million in the past four years to groups that offer job training to jailed or recently released parents. “We are concerned about the well-being of these children because their parents face real barriers to obtaining decent jobs, quality housing, or even public benefits,” says Lorin Harris, an associate program officer.

B. Diane Williams, president of the Safer Foundation, in Chicago, a charity that provides job training and other services to some 5,000 former prisoners annually, says “people are beginning to realize that there isn’t any at-risk group that doesn’t have ex-offenders in it.” The Safer Foundation, like many nonprofit ex-prisoner programs, strives to keep people from returning to behavior that could land them once again in prison. And it appears to be having some success. Ms. Williams says 17 percent of graduates from its one-year program in 1998 have since returned to prison, compared with a 48-percent recidivism rate for all of Cook County, Ill., that year.

In addition to the private money, the federal government is providing $108-million this year as part of a new program involving five federal departments — education, health and human services, housing and urban development, justice, and labor — to reward efforts with good track records in lowering the number of released prisoners who end up back behind bars. The money will be distributed to state corrections departments, which will then pass it on to nonprofit and other programs later this year.

Government Money Included

The new dollars signify a recent shift in opinion over how best to deal with current and former prisoners, criminal-justice experts say, and are spurred in large part by statistics showing that nearly two in three prisoners return to jail within four years after their release. “We certainly hope that the programs that benefit from this money will have an impact on crime rates,” says Adam Spector, a spokesman for the federal Office of Justice Programs, in the Justice Department.

Foundations and governments have changed their views on how best to deal with prisoners over the years. “Up until a generation ago, foundations and governments viewed rehabilitation as something desirable,” says Jeremy Travis, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a leader in research on prisoners.

But beginning in the 1970s and continuing until recently, politicians who had campaigned on law-and-order platforms chipped away at prisoner-rehabilitation programs, he says. In 1998, the most recent year for which statistics are available, only 6 percent of the total that governments spent on prisons nationally went to programs that help criminals learn the skills they need to avoid getting in trouble after their release. During much of the same period, says Mr. Travis, foundation interest in the plight of adult prisoners waned as attention turned to juvenile offenders and causes outside of criminal justice.

Now, as the number of adults leaving prison soars to an unprecedented 630,000 — a figure larger than the population of Boston or Washington — questions are emerging over whether past incarceration strategies and prison-building projects have worked. Tight state budgets have further prodded government leaders to look for alternatives to putting more people in jail.

Currently, nearly 2 million people live in prison cells nationally, an increase of more than 400 percent since 1973, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Prison-related costs have also skyrocketed. State and federal governments spent $9-billion on corrections programs in 1982, an amount that jumped to $44-billion in 1997, the latest figure available.

“For every state in the country, the bill for years of strict sentencing laws has come due,” says Robert E. Roberts, executive director of Project Return of Louisiana, a nonprofit organization that helps 300 former prisoners per year through counseling and other programs aimed at lowering Louisiana’s 75-percent recidivism rate. “Most states now realize that locking them up and throwing away the key is not working.”

Range of Approaches

Because of a lack of research on the effectiveness of programs for former prisoners, how best to help released inmates make the transition back into society remains an open question, one that continues to spark controversy as well as a wide range of approaches.

Many charity efforts combine multiple social services for former prisoners, while others emphasize a single issue. Project Return of Louisiana offers acupuncture and discussion sessions, and includes tribal rituals in its rehabilitation programs. Better People, a nonprofit group in Portland, Ore., pairs psychotherapy with job-placement help for the 350 former prisoners it serves.

In addition to paying for direct services, grant makers are also giving money to organize advocacy campaigns to lobby state and federal governments for increased spending and legislative changes to help former prisoners find jobs. Charity leaders working on these issues say certain laws, such as one in California — home to 150,000 prisoners — that bars ex-inmates from taking jobs in medicine, law, real estate, and education, make it unnecessarily difficult for former prisoners to find gainful employment.

Identifying What Works

Baltimore is being seen by some in philanthropy as a key incubator for such efforts because of its high rate of inmates scheduled for release from jail this year — about one for every 70 residents.

The Enterprise Foundation, in Baltimore, started by the late real-estate developer James Rouse, has spent $180,000 since 1999 on forming a collaborative effort to help former prisoners as part of its plans to help improve impoverished neighborhoods. The Maryland Re-Entry Partnership includes state agencies, Baltimore officials, and community-based nonprofit groups.

“These prisoners are returning to communities in which we’ve invested considerably” in housing and other programs, says Joann Levy, interim co-director of the Enterprise Foundation. “It only makes sense to extend that investment to include these people.”

One neighborhood group in the collaboration has opened a home, where nine ex-prisoners live while receiving drug treatment and job training. Located in a West Baltimore neighborhood pocked with vacant row houses and known for drug trafficking, Druid Heights Transitional Housing for Ex-Offenders might not seem like the best setting for reintegrating prisoners into the world.

But André G. Fisher, case manager for the men who live in the house, says the humble location is part of the point. Most prisoners returning to Baltimore’s neighborhoods come from the Druid Heights ZIP code and two others where there are also transitional houses, says Mr. Fisher.

“The idea is that this is the neighborhood they would have returned to anyway,” says Mr. Fisher. “This program gives them a chance to give back to the community that they’ve taken from.”

In exchange for housing, drug treatment, counseling, and skills courses, men in the program volunteer for park cleanups and take turns as part of a “peace patrol” that travels the neighborhood’s streets twice weekly to talk to corner drug dealers. “They let the negative people still on the corners know that there’s hope after the mistakes are made,” says Mr. Fisher.

While programs like the one in Druid Heights are tiny, Mr. Fisher and other nonprofit leaders hope their successes will provide models for big government efforts.

Diana Morris, director of the Open Society Institute’s Baltimore office, says “government will have to take the lion’s share of responsibility for this.” But she says philanthropy can help identify “key ingredients” needed to help former prisoners and keep them from returning to jail. The Open Society Institute has given about $650,000 to programs in Maryland that involve former prisoners.

The Open Society Institute is paying researchers at the University of Maryland at College Park to evaluate efforts in Baltimore and is holding bimonthly gatherings of nonprofit leaders to discuss what is working to aid ex-inmates and what is not. It is also organizing groups of former prisoners to lobby government leaders about successful programs.

Paucity of Grants

Many grant makers, however, remain unpersuaded that aid to current or former prisoners should become a priority for them. “There still aren’t many funders in this area because many see the population served as being undeserving,” says Deborah Harrington, program director at the Woods Fund of Chicago. Since 2000, the Woods Fund has provided $223,000 to groups that offer services to recently released inmates, a significant percentage of its grants budget. Ms. Harrington says the fund began making such grants because so few foundations were doing so.

Many charity leaders hope that by emphasizing the costs to neighborhoods and to society of not investing in efforts to prevent criminals from becoming repeat offenders, they will draw new donors to their causes.

Others point to a moral responsibility that they say government and philanthropy share to redeem those who many see as irredeemable.

“These people have paid their debt to society,” says Mr. Fisher, the Baltimore case manager. “You can’t condemn them forever. If they’ve earned anything, it’s a hand up, so they can help themselves.”