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Reginald Dwayne Betts

Essay on reentry.

Last Updated

May 24, 2021

This ‘Essay on Reentry’ charts life after prison: and the way that others keep your sentence alive even when you’re wishing to just get on with your own life. It’s about secrets and choice and disclosure. And in the midst of all this, there is also love between a son and his dad, a son like a “straggling angel, / lost from his pack finding a way to fulfill his / duty.”

Letterpress art by Myrna Keliher .

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Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of a memoir and three books of poetry. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison , was awarded the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction. His books of poetry are Shahid Reads His Own Palm , Bastards of the Reagan Era , and Felon . He is a graduate of Prince George’s Community College, the University of Maryland, the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, and is currently a PhD student at Yale Law School.

Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and one of the things I love about poetry is how it can collapse so many different things that happened in your life, across different periods of your life — the past, the present, and the future even — into one poem. And in this way, you’re facing the pain of yourself from the past, and hopefully the increasing healing of yourself now, and the person you want to be, and the person you will become. And all of those are in some kind of conversation with each other. It doesn’t make it easy, but it does make it powerful.

[ music: “Praise the Rain” by Gautam Srikishan ]

“Essay on Reentry” by Reginald Dwayne Betts:

“At two a.m., without enough spirits spilling into my liver to know to keep my mouth shut, my youngest learned of years I spent inside a box: a spell, a kind of incantation I was under; not whisky, but History: I robbed a man. This, months before he would drop bucket after bucket on opposing players, the entire bedraggled bunch five & six & he leaping as if every lay-up erases something. That’s how I saw it, my screaming-coaching-sweating presence recompense for the pen. My father has never seen me play ball is part of this. My oldest knew, told of my crimes by a stranger. Tell me we aren’t running towards failure is what I want to ask my sons, but it is two in the a.m. The oldest has gone off to dream in the comfort of his room, the youngest despite him seeming more lucid than me, just reflects cartoons back from his eyes. So when he tells me, Daddy it’s okay, I know what’s happening is some straggling angel, lost from his pack finding a way to fulfill his duty, lending words to this kid who crawls into my arms, wanting, more than stories of my prison, the sleep that he fought while I held court at a bar with men who knew that when the drinking was done, the drinking wouldn’t make the stories we brought home any easier to tell.”

[ music: “Every Place We’ve Been” by Gautam Srikishan ]

One of the things that speaks to me in the poem is the question about identity. And in this poem, the speaker of the poem, the poet, Reginald Dwayne Betts, all of these identities are being put forward for him: a man, a man who’s been out with friends, a father, a son, a man who did one thing for which he was punished, and a man who lives with ongoing punishment in the question of reentry and a sentence and a story that follows him around, a man who’s interested in sports and interested in coaching, and clearly, because he’s writing poems, he’s interested in literature, and a man who is awake at night , and a deep tenderness and a sense of lamenting, and a man who is both alone and profoundly in tender contact, and a man, also, who is considering the way within which time plays itself out. And he is writing as a Black man who has served a custodial sentence, and writing in a critiquing way about a prison structure that is so leant towards incarcerating Black men.

There are so many scenes in this poem. And this can be a really helpful way, sometimes, to look at a poem and to break it down into scenes, almost like it’s a film. That doesn’t work with every poem, but it really works with this poem. And in this, the character of time is really present. So the first scene: a man’s awake at 2 a.m. His son’s next to him, and the cartoons on the television are being reflected in the eyes of the son.

And then the next scene goes just back a little bit in time to the poet, who’s at the bar with some other fellas. And then it goes back earlier, much earlier, and the man’s locked up, and back earlier again, in terms of a scene, and we hear of the crime. And then time shoots forward to a new scene, where this younger son is at a sports game, a basketball game. And then the father’s watching the son at the sports game. And then the next scene goes back in time, where the poet himself is a boy now, and at a sports game where his own father never made it. And then time changes again to a new scene, to a more recent time where the poet’s older son has heard of the father’s crimes from a stranger. And then we’re right back in the present moment, and the sleepless son is telling his dad, it’s OK, daddy. And then that son is crawling into his dad’s arms, wanting to find the sleep that he’s been fighting. And then we go back to a bunch of men coming home from a bar, with stories that aren’t easy to tell. And so time goes back and forth and back and forth, in all of these scenes that we can see so clearly.

And the poet isn’t telling us too much about all the things that he’s thinking, except, in the simplicity and purity of the language, we feel all the weight of the things that he is thinking. He’s not saying, “And this was in my mind, and that was in my mind, and this was in my mind, and these four things were in my mind, and I was angry at the stranger, and I didn’t want a stranger to tell this other son,” but we know it there, because he’s giving us such simple images to see. And they are quickly described, but we never feel rushed, while seeing those scenes. And as a result, I think we’re brought into a phenomenal and beautiful, elongated moment that holds so much time in it.

[ music: “Memoriam” by Gautam Srikishan ]

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a master at using words with multiple meanings. The book that this poem is in is called Felon . And that word, “felon,” comes from an old word, “felun,” an adjective meaning cruel or wicked. And so by putting that on the front cover of the book, there’s a challenge. And even the front cover of the book has the paintings of four Black men whose faces are mostly covered over with cloth or with paint, and so all you see is the color of their skin and the word “felon.” And this book is in a certain sense an exploration of all these kinds of terms that are used in criminal contexts — used in the justice system or in prison — and not just the word “felon,” but other words, too. So “reentry,” for instance: reentry is a way to talk about what happens when a person has served a sentence in prison and is now coming home; but also “essay”: “essay” coming from the French word “essayer,” meaning to try. And you wonder, is this over and over again trying to reenter? And that reentry isn’t just when a person has served a sentence and is now home, but actually, you’re going to be trying over and over again to reenter.

[ music: “What Did You Not Hear” by Gautam Srikishan ]

Reginald Dwayne Betts served an eight-year prison sentence for robbery, as he was mentioning in the poem, fourteen months of which was in solitary confinement. And when he was in solitary, somebody, and he never knew who, would put arbitrary books through his door, which he was reading, including, at one point, the 1971 poetry anthology The Black Poets . And he describes this as a way that moved him into poetry. And so when he left, he went on to the University of Maryland, and then he went on to study law, and he got accepted at the bar. And now he’s doing, or has recently completed, a PhD in law at Yale.

And so, for him, he is highlighting through this use of language a phenomenal critique of the ways within which words, slang words that are used to refer to what it’s like to serve a prison sentence, continue on outside. And he is using this character of time, I think, to critique the idea that criminal justice is served and finished in time and that the question about reentry, the burden about what reentry is, is put on people who — more than likely, in many situations — shouldn’t have been serving the amount of time that they were: eight years for a carjacking, fourteen months in solitary confinement. He was sixteen, and he was tried as an adult. So that criminal justice system is being put under the spotlight, and that, I think, is being held up to be examined in this whole book, and elements of that in this poem, as well.

There are all kinds of reachings-out that are happening in this poem. A man is reaching out to his friends by going out to spend an evening talking and drinking at a bar. And a man is reaching out to the son that’s awake in the middle of the night, and lamenting the lack of reaching out that happened between him and his dad when he was younger, going to sports games himself. And so in many ways, this is a poem exploring its own masculinities and exploring the connection of tenderness and the vulnerability of sadness that’s there. There is pain, in terms of how he worries about running towards failure, and pain too in the way that some stranger told his older son the story about his father’s spell in prison, and wanting to not let that happen a second time, with the second son, but presumably also knowing that that’s going to be a burden — a sentence, really — that the younger son will carry.

I find it so moving, the way that just after he’s told his younger son, the scene flips and moves forward and says, “This, months / before he would drop bucket after bucket / on opposing players, the entire bedraggled / bunch five & six & he leaping as if / every lay-up erases something.” He sees this energy in his younger son, a few months later, after this scene, and he is wondering, is my son doing this to erase something, or hoping that something could be erased? What? The shame that’s being put on the family because of something that was paid for in the justice system already? There is a sense of vulnerability and wishing that there could be such a thing as redemption, in a system that doesn’t seem to believe in redemption for people.

[ music: “White Filament” by Blue Dot Sessions ]

I think this poem has a variety of invitations. One of them is to reflect on how a criminal justice system punishes families and punishes people, far beyond a particular custodial sentence. Whether or not that custodial sentence was even just in the first place, of course, is being critiqued, and even if it is, to consider the ongoing impact on the entirety of the family, the callous way within which people might speak about somebody else and what’s the first story we tell about them. I think that’s being highlighted here, and the way within which language to speak about the experience of a family being caught up in the criminal justice system needs to be considered, and we need to have a family-first and person-first approach toward thinking about what true redemption, in terms of thinking about what a societal justice could look like.

Lily Percy: “Essay on Reentry” comes from Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Felon . Thank you to W. W. Norton & Company for giving us permission to use Reginald’s poem. Read it on our website, at onbeing.org.

Poetry Unbound is: Gautam Srikishan, Chris Heagle, Erin Colasacco, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, and me, Lily Percy. Our music is composed and provided by Gautam Srikishan and Blue Dot Sessions. This podcast is produced by On Being Studios, which is located on Dakota land.

We also produce other podcasts you might enjoy, like On Being with Krista Tippett , Becoming Wise , and This Movie Changed Me. Find those wherever you like to listen, or visit us at onbeing.org to find out more.

Books & Music

Recommended reading.

Felon: Poems

Author: Reginald Dwayne Betts

Bastards of the Reagan Era

Shahid Reads His Own Palm

A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison

The On Being Project is an affiliate partner of Bookshop.org and Amazon.com. Any earnings we receive through these affiliate partnerships go into directly supporting The On Being Project.

Music Played

Music from Poetry Unbound

Artist: Gautam Srikishan

Written by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Read by Pádraig Ó Tuama

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Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Poetry After Prison

By Dan Chiasson

The ghazal, a traditional Arabic poetic form, was carried into English in the nineteen-sixties, and enjoyed a vogue among American poets several decades later. It is intricate and tangled—the word “ghazal” relates to the Arabic word for “thread”—but it tends to throw into relief a single word, repeated deterministically at the ends of stanzas, like a dead end in a maze. The opening poem in Reginald Dwayne Betts’s third book of poetry, “ Felon ,” is “Ghazal”:

From inside a cell, the night sky isn’t the measure— that’s why it’s prison’s vastness your eyes reflect after prison. My lover don’t believe in my sadness. She says whisky, not time, is what left me wrecked after prison.

The word “prison” punctuates every couplet of the poem. “Ghazal” is fourteen fresh beginnings, fourteen attempts at starting over, each collapsing into the same dire close. After a few couplets, you see the Sisyphean pattern. But there is an empowering twist in the end: the ghazal also requires that its author inscribe his own name in its final line. Betts, who went to prison when he was sixteen, uses the name he gave himself while behind bars, Shahid: “You have come so far, Beloved, & for what, another song? / Then sing. Shahid you’re loved, not shipwrecked, after prison.”

Poets tell various kinds of down-and-out stories about being rescued by their vocations, but Betts’s is among the most amazing I have heard. When Betts was an honor student at a Maryland high school, he and a friend carjacked at gunpoint a man outside a suburban mall. Betts was arrested, tried as an adult, and sentenced to nine years in prison. While he was in solitary confinement, someone slid a copy of “ The Black Poets ,” an anthology edited by Dudley Randall, under Betts’s door. He read it and began writing poems. After his release, in 2005, Betts attended community college in Maryland, then Yale Law School; he worked as an advocate and a public defender, and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in law. In 2012, President Obama appointed him to an advisory group on youth incarceration. He lectures on criminal-justice reform, in addition to writing and publishing poems and essays.

“Felon” is fixated on the ways we tell stories, but it is poetry that Betts credits for his redemption. The book shows how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative: stanzas interrupt the flow and sequence of time by constantly hitting refresh; jagged line breaks appear to sever cause and effect; in place of “days & their ruthless abundance,” poetic form offers itself as an alternative calendar. Though “every story worth telling has a thousand beginnings,” as Betts writes, most storytellers are forced to choose just one. But “Parking Lot” and “Parking Lot, Too” use the story of Betts’s arrest to expose this false choice. In the first, “A confession begins when I walk into a parking lot.” He never walks out; instead, he is driven to jail.

But, in the second poem, instead of an advancing narrative we get a stuck needle:

A confession begins when I walked Black out of that parking lot. A confession began when I, without combing my hair, dressed For a day that would find me walking out of that parking lot.

The speaker here isn’t Betts. It’s some innocent person who might have been arrested if Betts and his friend hadn’t been caught: “A confession begins when the police perceive us as one.” Or is the beginning even farther back? The poem concludes, “A confession begins, my confession / Began, with a woman stitching stars and stripes into a flag.” The crime the speaker confesses to is being black.

A confession is taken as an acknowledgment of guilt, but, in a legal framework, it can be a script written for you, confirmed under duress. We use the word in a loose sense in everyday life, but, for Betts, disclosure is always problematic, always fraught, and often a trap. His 2009 memoir, “ A Question of Freedom ,” includes an epigraph from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “This hour I tell things in confidence / I may not tell everybody but I will tell you.” Betts’s poems are a constructed intimacy, where he can say “in confidence” what he still can’t state directly or publicly, or even aloud. “All the stories I keep to myself tell how / violence broke & made me,” he writes. The poem “Confession” is a litany of things the speaker can’t, in fact, confess to his wife: “how do I explain that outside / On nights like this, is where I first / Learned just how violent I might be?” These poems redirect speech through the channels of poetry, where not-saying casts a special sort of spell.

But “Felon” is not a book about guilt; it is a book about instruction. Its pedagogy suggests how the past might be reframed and made intelligible. Three separate poems are titled “Essay on Reentry” (the word “essay” means, of course, an attempt). The very repetition of the title suggests how any felon, post-prison, might try and fail to narrate his past, living out the future in a reiterative loop. The most devastating of these poems are about Betts’s sons. Like Whitman, who found himself stumped when a child asked him an obvious question (“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child?”), Betts is taken aback by the simplicity of his younger son’s words (“Daddy, it’s okay”) when, after a night of drinking, he blurts out the story of his years “spent inside a box.”

Betts’s poems about fatherhood, some of the most powerful I’ve read, describe a nearly unimaginable bind: how do you explain that you actually did something that a racist would assume you were likely to end up doing anyway? Betts must somehow convey that statistics are not “prophecy, / & ain’t none of us expect to be in the NFL / or in a cell.” But the most extraordinary of the fatherhood poems is “If Absence Was the Source of Silence,” in which the speaker wonders how to tell his sons why a woman they meet on the street “swallows as she crosses / into what might as well be oncoming traffic, / remembering a man from her past—.” It’s a reversal of the book’s normal patterns of inquiry: instead of probing his own traumatic past, Betts must try to imagine someone else’s:

stories my sons would not know, not because of a need to hide history, those bedrooms & boardrooms & work where trust became carnage; no, these things would be Pandora’s box untouched. & yet, they will know—because.

What looks like an obvious racist scenario—a woman crosses the street when a black man approaches—also suggests, to Betts, the history of men’s violence against women. It is a threat that Betts and his sons helplessly and literally embody. “& the because is what I tell my sons,” Betts writes, “about what their hands might do, in long / conversation about what the hands / of men do. Their hands, my own.” He is able to balance the entire poem on the fulcrum of an either/or—racism on the one hand, sexual violence on the other—that he needn’t, perhaps couldn’t, resolve.

Autobiography functions in this book in fascinating, risky ways. Some of the stories here belong to Betts; others seem to refer to his father, who was also incarcerated, or to friends in and out of prison. The tricky point is that all of it is, to recall the great word that Whitman used, “assumed” under his name, and expressed in his voice. Yet Betts’s method of retelling the stories of others is not merely an aesthetic choice. Several poems here are constructed out of redacted court documents from cases in which people have been held for not paying bail—in essence, for being poor and black. “Redaction is a dialect after prison,” Betts writes, in “Ghazal.” The black bars of redacted text, which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours. They’re also rhythmic units, building time and suspense into the otherwise affectless prose. For Betts, the way to expression passes through such troubled silences. ♦

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Essay on Reentry

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At two a.m., without enough spirits spilling into my liver to know  to keep my mouth shut, my youngest learned of years I spent inside a box: a spell, a kind of incantation I was under; not whisky, but History: I robbed a man. This, months before he would drop bucket after bucket on opposing players, the entire bedraggled bunch five & six & he leaping as if every lay-up erases something. That’s how I saw it, my screaming-coaching-sweating presence recompense for the pen. My father has never seen me play ball is part of this. My oldest knew, told of my crimes by a stranger. Tell me we aren’t running towards failure is what I want to ask my sons, but it is two in the a.m. The oldest has gone off to dream in the comfort of his room, the youngest despite him seeming more lucid than me, just reflects cartoons back from his eyes. So when he tells me, Daddy it’s okay, I know what’s happening is some straggling angel, lost from his pack finding a way to fulfill his duty, lending words to this kid who crawls into my arms, wanting, more than stories of my prison, the sleep that he fought while I held court at a bar with men who knew that when the drinking was done, the drinking wouldn’t make the stories we brought home any easier to tell.

From Felon . Copyright © 2019 by Reginald Dwayne Betts. Used by permission of the author.

More by this poet

Memorial hoops.

The day broke a record for cold, for us wanting To be anywhere but outside, & it was late May, the weekend we called Memorial. My mother Is a veteran, but that is a story for another time, & we were driving into the mother of rivers state, My youngest son, named after two men, one who Turned a trumpet into a prayer, the other who

When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving

in the backseat, my sons laugh & tussle, far from Tamir’s age, adorned with his complexion & cadence, & already warned

about toy pistols, though my rhetoric ain’t about fear, but dislike—about how guns have haunted me since I first gripped

For a Bail Denied

            for A.S. 

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of us could know, & now, all is lost; lost is all in what came after—the kid, & we should call him kid, call him a

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StarTribune

'essay on reentry,' a poem by reginald dwayne betts.

A poem by Reginald Dwayne Betts:

At two a.m., without enough spirits

spilling into my liver to know

to keep my mouth shut, my youngest

learned of years I spent inside a box: a spell,

a kind of incantation I was under; not whisky,

but History: I robbed a man. This, months

before he would drop bucket after bucket

on opposing players, the entire bedraggled

bunch fine & six & he leaping as if

every lay-up erases something. That's how

I saw it, my screaming-coaching-sweating

presence recompense for the pen. My father

has never seen me play ball is part of this.

My oldest knew, told of my crimes by

a stranger. Tell me we aren't running

towards failure is what I want to ask my sons,

but it is two in the a.m. The oldest has gone off

to dream in the comfort of his room, the youngest

despite him seeming more lucid than me,

just reflects cartoons back from his eyes.

So when he tells me, Daddy it's okay, I know

what's happening is some straggling angel,

lost from his pack finding a way to fulfill his

duty, lending words to this kid who crawls

into my arms, wanting, more than stories

of my prison, the sleep that he fought while

I held court at a bar with men who knew

that when the drinking was done,

the drinking wouldn't make the stories

we brought home any easier to tell.

From "Felon: Poems," ©2019 Reginald Dwayne Betts, reprinted with permission from W.W. Norton & Company

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Essay on reentry, by reginald dwayne betts.

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Systematic review of qualitative evaluations of reentry programs addressing problematic drug use and mental health disorders amongst people transitioning from prison to communities

Sacha kendall.

1 Australian Centre for Public and Population Health Research, Faculty of Health, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW Australia

Sarah Redshaw

Stephen ward.

2 Justice Health & Forensic Mental Health Network, Sydney, NSW Australia

Sarah Wayland

Elizabeth sullivan, associated data.

The dataset(s) supporting the conclusions of this article is (are) included or referenced within the article.

The paper presents a systematic review and metasynthesis of findings from qualitative evaluations of community reentry programs. The programs sought to engage recently released adult prison inmates with either problematic drug use or a mental health disorder.

Seven biomedical and social science databases, Cinahl, Pubmed, Scopus, Proquest, Medline, Sociological abstracts and Web of Science and publisher database Taylor and Francis were searched in 2016 resulting in 2373 potential papers. Abstract reviews left 140 papers of which 8 were included after detailed review. Major themes and subthemes were identified through grounded theory inductive analysis of results from the eight papers. Of the final eight papers the majority (6) were from the United States. In total, the papers covered 405 interviews and included 121 (30%) females and 284 (70%) males.

Findings suggest that the interpersonal skills of case workers; access to social support and housing; and continuity of case worker relationships throughout the pre-release and post-release period are key social and structural factors in program success.

Evaluation of community reentry programs requires qualitative data to contextualize statistical findings and identify social and structural factors that impact on reducing incarceration and improving participant health. These aspects of program efficacy have implications for reentry program development and staff training and broader social and health policy and services.

Effective community reentry programs are one component in strategies to reduce recidivism and assist in the successful transition of prison inmates to community. The rising rate of adult incarceration is a major public health and societal problem worldwide. Globally, there are an estimated 10.35 million people in custody (Walmsley 2015 ). Prison inmates are a vulnerable population characterised by complex health problems. People who have experienced imprisonment have higher rates of mental illness, infectious diseases, chronic diseases and mortality in comparison to the general population (Bradshaw et al. 2017 ; Fazel and Baillargeon 2011 ). Problematic drug use is pervasive, affecting approximately one third of male prison inmates and half of female prison inmates (Fazel et al. 2017 ). Inadequately treated mental health problems and substance use is associated with re-incarceration (Kinner and Wang 2014 ).

Reentry to the community is known to be highly stressful. This is attributable to the complexity of health problems and poor engagement with health and social services (Fazel and Baillargeon 2011 ; Fazel et al. 2006 ; Kinner et al. 2011 ; Kinner 2006 ). A recent systematic review of randomized controlled trials of community reentry interventions designed to improve prisoner health from imprisonment to 1 year post release concluded ‘the high burden of mortality, morbidity, and hospitalization post-release suggested that a greater focus on improving health in this population during and after release is warranted’ (Kouyoumdjian et al. 2015 p.e29) and that there are substantial gaps in evidence (also see Hayhurst et al. 2015 ).

We aim to identify and synthesise the factors relevant to successful community reentry identified by qualitative reentry program evaluations. A systematic review of the literature was conducted to synthesise current evidence in this area with a focus on reentry programs targeting mental health disorders and problematic drug use. People with mental health disorders and problematic drug use are over-represented in the prison system. This is in part due to a lack of community support services for these populations coupled with harsh legislation targeting particular behaviours (Brinkley-Rubinstein 2013 ).

The post-release period is a high-risk period characterised by poor continuity of care, inadequate social support and limited financial resources resulting in poorer health outcomes and a return to crime related activities (Binswanger et al. 2012 ). Prison inmates with a history of drug dependence are particularly vulnerable, with higher rates of morbidity, mortality and return to custody in the 6-month post-release period (McMillan et al. 2008 ) and a heightened risk for mortality in the first week post-release (Bukten et al. 2017 ). Prison inmates with a history of mental health disorder experience worse outcomes on release from prison including substance use, poor mental health, and criminal activity (Cutcher et al. 2014 ). Diagnosis of a major psychiatric disorder can be predictive of recidivism and associated with shorter time to re-incarceration (Fu et al. 2013 ). People with a dual diagnosis of mental health disorder and substance use have a risk of re-incarceration more than 40% higher than individuals with no diagnosis (Blank et al. 2014 ).

Recent research examining the causal relationship between problematic drug use and re-arrest shows a complex longitudinal association between these factors and identifies social factors such as access to support and services as significantly impacting these behaviours in the reentry population (Link and Hamilton 2017 ). This new evidence highlights the critical importance of access to effective reentry programs and social support for people exiting prison. Moreover, it indicates the relevance of qualitative program evaluation to understand the nuances of program efficacy and the particular quality and type of social components that program participants find beneficial.

Community reentry programs for people exiting prison are typically evaluated applying quantitative methods. Quantitative evaluation is necessary for examining program outcomes, however, when a program aims to improve the health of participants or prevent re-incarceration, quantitative methods are limited. Health is comprised not only of physical components that lend themselves to objective measurement but also subjective and relational dimensions that are embedded in participant experience. Similarly, the structural factors that impact on incarceration are more complex than statistical crime data can reveal (de Viggiani 2007 ). In contrast, qualitative evaluations of reentry programs reveal the experiential elements of program success and the social and structural aspects of reentry programs that impact positively on participant health and reducing incarceration. They allow for the exploration of the ‘why’ in program efficacy.

Detailed information gathered in qualitative evaluations can contribute to the demonstration of implementation intensity and program fidelity by connecting treatment subjects’ experiences with assessment of program elements (Miller et al. 2012 ; Miller 2014 ; Neale et al. 2005 ; Thomas and Harden 2008 ). Qualitative evaluations contextualize quantitative findings to effectively interpret a program’s holistic value and provide insight into source effects such as gender, ethnicity, education and other structural factors (CRD 2008 ). Synthesising qualitative research has similarly become important. Meta-synthesis seeks to explain and understand phenomena by pulling together findings from qualitative research (Stone and Seaman 2014 ) into a new integrative interpretation (Finfgeld 2003 ).

Sample and procedures

The aim of this review is to provide a synthesis of the factors relevant to successful community reentry identified by qualitative reentry program evaluations. The scope of the review was papers describing qualitative evaluations of reentry programs for people transitioning from prison to communities targeting substance use and mental health disorders.

A search of databases for published papers containing qualitative evaluations of reentry health programs was completed using the PRISMA statement in October 2016 with a cut-off date of 2006. The cut-off date was chosen as there were few published findings for such programs before this date. This was in part due to the fact that reentry programs are relatively new and also to the lack of evaluation of such programs (Lattimore and Visher 2013 ). The review was restricted to studies relating to adult prison inmates over 18 years of age.

The search included databases Cinahl, Pubmed, Scopus, Proquest, Medline, Sociological abstracts and Web of Science and publisher database Taylor and Francis. Search terms included ‘pre-release’, ‘transitional’, ‘reintegration’, ‘throughcare’ and ‘reentry program and prison’, ‘interview’ and ‘qualitative study’. Figure  1 details the search strategy in PRISMA format.

PRISMA flow diagram

The search resulted in 2373 papers including duplicates. The most productive databases were Scopus, Proquest and Taylor and Francis, which yielded 2025 between them. Abstract reviews resulted in the selection of 140 papers. Of these, 66 appeared to relate prison inmates’ experiences of reentry programs. An iterative process then followed in which these papers were reviewed by the team of three researchers using a summary spreadsheet which included publication details, the focus of the paper and the abstract. Those relating primarily to substance use and mental health disorder were selected for review. This excluded papers focusing specifically on employment ( n  = 3), housing ( n  = 1) and college programs ( n  = 2) or specifically addressing a health condition, i.e. HIV ( n  = 1). The review then excluded those that were not qualitative ( n  = 2), not evaluating a program ( n  = 17), not concerned with prison inmates ( n  = 5) did not extend to community post-release ( n  = 12 focused on in-prison programs only), or were concerned with a specific group such as young or long term prison inmates (and did not meet the reentry health program criteria) ( n  = 16). See PRISMA diagram for reasons for exclusion and Table  1 for the final eight papers selected with characteristics of the studies involved.

Final papers selected for detailed review

Following the most recent and well-cited protocol for qualitative reviews developed by Walsh and Downe ( 2006 ) all papers were reviewed by three team members for rationale, recruitment, methods of analysis and findings. The review included assessing the validity of results and for rigour across the rationale, methodology, findings and limitations. The final papers were examined in detail taking a grounded theory approach (Charmaz 2006 ) allowing for inductive analysis. Major themes and subthemes were identified through analysis of results from all papers. These themes were recorded in a table indicating the papers related to each theme. Detail from each paper relating to the themes identified were collected and summarised for each theme.

As in Thomas and Harden ( 2008 ), “going beyond” the content of the original studies was achieved by using the descriptive themes identified in inductive analysis of study findings. Barriers and facilitators inferred from the views participants expressed about reentry program experiences were captured in the descriptive themes and the implications of these views for reentry program development were then considered.

Of the final eight papers selected the majority (6) were from the United States, one was from the United Kingdom, and one was from New Zealand. In six studies it was stated that interviews were semi-structured, in one interviews were structured though there was opportunity for individual program participants to expand upon information gathered through the questionnaire by giving personal, narrative accounts, and one study used focus groups only. The number of interview or focus group participants ranged from 10 to 226. In total, the papers covered 405 interviews (including 24 in focus groups). Three papers focused on female participants only, four included males only and one included both. A total of 121 (30%) female and 284 (70%) male participants were included in the studies. Ages were provided as a range or as an average with a minimum 19 years and a maximum 56 years. One paper did not include information on age or ethnicity/race and three papers provided an age range but not ethnicity/race. In all studies participants were invited to be part of the research and voluntarily attended the program being evaluated. In three studies a carefully matched control group of those who chose not to or were unable to participate in the program due to their imminent release was used (Miller et al. 2016 ; Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ; Zortman et al. 2016 ). In one study, participants were initially randomly assigned by selecting every fourth name on a list of program participants over a five year period (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ).

The overarching conclusion from all papers reviewed was that participants in reentry programs benefit from a combination of practical resources and empathic support spanning from pre-release to varying lengths of time in the post-release period. Three major themes were identified across all papers: 1) structural context; 2) supportive relationships and 3) continuity of care including pre-release planning. The themes shown in Table  2 while distinct have some overlap and interconnection. The following discussion presents a metasynthesis of findings from the papers analysed following identification of common themes.

Key themes identified with subthemes

Structural context

The importance of structural context was identified in all of the papers reviewed. The structural context, identified as the systems that govern an individual’s engagement with, or access to services includes aspects of the social system impacting on the individual’s health and wellbeing and capacity to avoid re-arrest. In the studies reviewed, structural context translated into specific forms of practical support provided via the program or relational and psychological factors associated with service provision.

Housing and employment were identified in all studies as the most critical forms of practical support or ‘recovery capital’ (Elison et al. 2016 ) in terms of desistance from problematic drug use and avoiding reincarceration (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ; Hunter et al. 2016 ). This was acknowledged in programs either through the direct provision of housing as in the Solid Start Program evaluated by Pleggenkuhle et al. ( 2016 ) or via the role of program case workers who were assigned to assist participants in accessing housing or employment by linking them in to other services (Angell et al. 2014 ; Gilbert and Elley 2015 ). In one study, housing was identified as the primary social factor impacting on reentry success and precursor for all other forms of social capital that might promote participant health and avoidance of re-arrest such as education, employment and pro-social relationships (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ). In Zortman et al. ( 2016 ), progression through the reentry program was contingent on finding employment whilst obtainment of housing and increasing independence were seen as markers of reentry success. The Fresh Start program evaluated by Hunter et al. ( 2016 ) focused on building employment readiness, job seeking and retention in addition to coordination of housing and other community services. In Angell et al. ( 2014 ), case managers focused on assisting inmates with mental illness in building community connections with mental health services, housing/landlords and social networks in order to establish long term sources of support.

A significant issue for individuals exiting the prison system is how to overcome the structural deficits of stigma and discrimination associated with incarceration. Lack of credit history, finances, references from landlords and employment presented major barriers to participants securing housing post-release (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ). A number of the studies highlighted the important role of caseworkers in assisting participants to overcome these structural barriers via advocacy and access to their knowledge and connections with services (i.e ‘social capital’) (Angell et al. 2014 , p496; Gilbert and Elley 2015 ). Assisting program participants with accessing housing and other resources was also identified as an important way in which caseworkers bonded and established trust with participants (Angell et al. 2014 ; Hunter et al. 2016 ; Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ), which in turn promoted personal agency and attitude change in participants (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ). These factors are identified as relevant to both positive reentry experience and success in the short term but also capacity to reintegrate into the community in the longer term through access to resources and sustainable social support (Elison et al. 2016 ; Gilbert and Elley 2015 ).

The combination of both resources and empathic support provided by caseworkers produced positive relational and psychological outcomes for participants in the short and long term including reconnection with family (Hunter et al., 2016 ), improved interpersonal relationships (Zortman et al. 2016 ) improved self-efficacy (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ) and formation of pro-social identity (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ). Pleggenkuhle et al. ( 2016 ) note that stable housing was associated with increased personal agency, optimism, goal-setting, success and responsibility. Participants experienced changes in attitude and thinking and were more likely than the comparison sample to describe future plans such as specific career paths or more definite educational or vocational plans and to demonstrate attitudinal changes (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 , p.390). The Pathway program evaluated by Gilbert and Elley ( 2015 ) included community volunteering to reintegrate participants in their local communities and link them to pro-social activities. Participants reported that this experience promoted positive psychological changes that were protective against recidivism including development of a pro-social identity through the overcoming of negative stereotypes, contribution to the community, responsibility and new pro-social relationships.

In all studies, participants reported the benefit of case managers working to understand and meet their individual needs. This was attributed to the action taken by case managers but also the disposition and commitment of case managers to provide clients with help and support. Case managers’ efforts to tailor support to their individual clients was highly valued by participants and central to program efficacy in terms of addressing the causes of ongoing offending (Gilbert and Elley 2015 , p 20). Participants reported that program responsiveness to individualised needs and goals resulted in connection to relevant resources and improved their chances of reentry success (Hunter et al., 2016 ). The characteristics of supportive relationships reported by program participants are outlined in detail in the next section.

Supportive relationships

The interpersonal skills of program case managers were identified as central to program efficacy. Characteristics such as empathy, honesty, non-judgmentalism, perseverance, reliability, care and commitment were repeatedly cited by participants as factors that contributed to their success in the program and reentry experience. Participants spoke of case managers as highly supportive (Gilbert and Elley 2015 , p25-26) and going ‘above and beyond’ for them (Angell et al. 2014 , p494). In Johnson et al. ( 2015 ) counsellors were recognised as a dependable support person during the reentry period when participants were feeling anxious, lonely or stressed (p344).

These characteristics engendered particular qualities in the client relationship. Participants described relationships with case managers built on trust, openness, respectful communication, solidarity and support. Trust was especially important for participants with serious mental illness because of participants’ past interactions with authorities, which were often coercive in nature (Angell et al. 2014 , p493). In addition, case managers were valued for being knowledgeable, non-authoritative, hopeful, persistent and available in a crisis. Participants reported how beneficial it was for them to have someone who didn’t give up on them (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ), someone who was there when they needed them (Johnson et al. 2015 ) and someone who had the knowledge and persistence to advocate on their behalf and assist them in overcoming structural barriers to reintegration (Angell et al. 2014 ; Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ).

Where bonding was established with the case manager, participants were motivated to succeed in the program and described the relationship as fostering their responsibility and independence (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ; Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ; Zortman et al. 2016 ). Participants had a vested interest in the program because of the alliance and ongoing relationship they had with program staff (Johnson et al. 2015 ). Effective engagement with clients through positive communication and practical assistance promoted investment in the shared tasks of treatment and enabled staff to provide client-centred care (Angell et al. 2014 ). In some instances the support of caseworkers was directly credited for keeping the participant out of prison (Gilbert and Elley 2015 , p23).

The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of programs are also relevant, as these influenced the nature of the client relationship and program focus. For example, in Angell et al. 2014 , acknowledgement that prison inmates with serious mental illness are most likely to prioritise reconnection with informal networks on release from prison meant that case managers coordinated their efforts with clients’ primary network members (Angell et al. 2014 , p 495). Similarly, clients in the Fresh Start Prisoner Reentry Program noted that case manager contact with family members helped to solidify reentry plans (Hunter et al. 2016 , p1306). The online model of transitional care evaluated by Elison et al. ( 2016 ) focused on developing the recovery capital of inmates by building individual coping skills. Participants in this program reported benefit from developing these skills but also significant anxiety about desistance from problematic drug use and crime in the post-release period without therapeutic and practical support.

The programs evaluated by Gilbert and Elley ( 2015 ) and Hunter et al. ( 2016 ) were both underpinned by the ‘Good Lives Model’, which focuses on meeting individual needs and promoting long term reintegration via a strengths-based approach. This model is built on the premise that ‘risk can be managed by promoting knowledge, strengths, skills and access to internal and external resources’ (Hunter et al. 2016 , p1301). In both these studies clients reported the benefit of ongoing support from supportive case managers who worked with them to meet their individual needs and goals. This included access to resources and connection to social networks and community activities that were protective against re-offending.

The importance of pro-social relationships was noted in several studies. Gilbert and Elley ( 2015 ) highlight the benefit of peer and mentor relationships in terms of building pro-social identity and support networks. Zortman et al. ( 2016 ) identify prosocial support networks as reinforcing pro-social behaviour and an essential element in the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders with a history of problematic drug use. Pleggenkuhle et al. ( 2016 ) note the motivational and therapeutic benefits of sharing experiences with peers facing similar challenges (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 , p389). In recognition that women needed assistance to initiate contact with positive sober people in the community, the Sober Network Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) program included interventions to build communication skills and connect participants with a sober support network (Johnson et al. 2015 , p336).

The papers evaluating female programs (Johnson et al. 2015 and Miller et al. 2016 ) identified particular social factors impacting on program efficacy. These factors were relational. Miller et al. ( 2016 ) found that women’s pathways to problematic drug use and crime are strongly associated with romantic partner relationships. Women also reported pathways to addiction and offending resulting from childhood trauma. These factors are relevant to program efficacy because even when women were engaged in the program and held positive views about rehabilitation, women experienced significant self doubt about their capacity to stay sober during the post-release period (p132). Women also reported significant dissatisfaction with perceived gender inequities related to treatment and health care in prison (p133). Significantly, these findings were not revealed by the quantitative component of the program evaluation, highlighting the importance of qualitative program review. Miller et al. ( 2016 ) conclude that reentry programs need to be developed including clearly definable female-specific components such as trauma-informed care and based on further understanding about choices related to social networks and relationships (p134).

Johnson et al. ( 2015 ) similarly argue that an interpersonal approach to Substance Use Disorders (SUD) and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is imperative to meeting the needs of incarcerated women because interpersonal difficulties not only affect MDD but are also predictors of SUD relapse and recidivism in women (p331). This program was a relationship-based intervention including ongoing therapeutic support from a prison counsellor and assistance with building a supportive peer network. Participants in the study reported that access to a structured program post-release was beneficial because of their lack of prosocial relationships with people who are sober (p344). The therapeutic relationship was especially important to staying sober because women highly valued the continuity of care from a familiar and trusted professional. Counsellors could effectively engage women in prison and post-release, even in instances of relapse (p345).

Continuity of care from the same worker made a significant difference to the women in the Johnson et al. ( 2015 ) study, however, continuity of care was a primary theme identified across all papers. The following section will outline this in further detail.

Continuity of care

Continuity of care is essential to building ‘recovery capital’ that extends beyond short term reentry to long term reintegration (Elison et al. 2016 ). As outlined above, ‘recovery capital’ took various forms in the studies reviewed including resources such as housing and employment; pro-social relationships; pro-social identity; coping skills; and community engagement. Continuity of care provided by professional staff allowed for attention to individual needs and the formation and maintenance of a therapeutic relationship (Hunter et al. 2016 ; Zortman et al. 2016 ). In Hunter et al. 2016 , program services were even added over time in response to participants’ stated risks, needs, strengths and goals (p1308). Participants identified this responsiveness as a key strength of the program. In Zortman et al. ( 2016 ) participants cited the continuity of care from case managers as an important component in their progression through the program, sustained success and relapse prevention. Through continuous support, participants were able to develop insight into their problems and build skills and resources to prevent substance use relapse (Zortman et al. 2016 ). Johnson et al. ( 2015 ) also report a significant decrease in depressive symptoms and substance use amongst program participants from baseline to 3 months post-release, attributed to the continuous support provided by counsellors.

Other participants reported that through ongoing case manager support and resources they were able to change their lives and experienced increased independence and responsibility over time as a result of these supports (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ). In some studies this was enhanced by supportive peer and family relationships (Angell et al. 2014 ; Gilbert and Elley 2015 ; Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ; Zortman et al. 2016 ). Indeed, due to the limited resources in some studies, there was a focus on reconnecting participants with family or new social supports in order to build sustainable recovery capital (Angell et al. 2014 ).

Pre-release support was identified as critical to success in the post-release period in terms of initial identification of needs and goals and building rapport with case managers (Angell et al. 2014 ; Hunter et al. 2016 ; Miller 2014 ). Pre-release planning was administered in differing ways across the programs. Elison et al. ( 2016 ) found potential for an online program to support the process of recovery from substance use in prison and provide continuity of care in the reentry process. Elison et al. ( 2016 ) identify graded transition from prison to community with enhanced opportunities for intervention and rehabilitation as possible contributors to ‘increased effectiveness and sustained therapeutic benefits’ of the program (p.177). Another program, Sober Network Interpersonal Psychotherapy, ‘provides contact with the same prison-based counsellor from within prison through the first 3 months after release to stabilize women until they can get established with community treatment providers’ (Johnson et al. 2015 , p332). Johnson et al. ( 2015 ) give accounts of pre-release program processes such as establishing positive social connections by reaching out to sober people while still incarcerated.

The Solid Start housing provision and social support program included pre-release planning which enabled physical separation from prior residence and opportunity for change, case management and coordination of services according to individual need (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 , p.383). The Fresh Start program evaluated by Hunter et al. ( 2016 ) included case managers working with their clients to complete a ‘ReEntry Plan’ reflecting the clients’ strengths, goals, and identified needs so that each participant had a treatment plan before exiting the correctional facility. Case managers in the Fresh Start program ‘served as a natural bridge for individuals transitioning from prison to … community’ and sought to (a) enhance motivation and engagement; (b) establish clear collaboration between the criminal justice system, treatment providers, and community supports; (c) establish continuity of care; and (d) provide pre- and post-release supports (p.1303).

Program staff in the study of Miller et al. ( 2016 ) also assisted program participants through individualized ‘Reentry Accountability Plans’ including coordination of mental health, medical, and drug treatment and linking to community resources prior to release’ (p.131). In the Pathway Program, individual needs are assessed in a 2-month ‘phasing in’ pre-release process reported by participants as important to preparing for release and decreasing the stressors associated with reentry (Gilbert and Elley 2015 , p.24). Participants reported finding value in different service elements, reflecting the individualised nature of the client plans (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ).

Program participants recognise the need for ongoing support and in some instances, the opportunity for continuity of care was the primary motivator for program participation (Hunter et al. 2016 ; Johnson et al. 2015 ). Participant motivation is an important factor in program efficacy, as Pleggenkuhle et al. ( 2016 ) demonstrate that the facilitation of positive and practical attitudes can be an important mechanism of desistance (p393). Overall, participants across all studies reported that continuity of care offered the tools to become independent. This was not only about accessing housing and other structural resources but the psychological shifts that come through ongoing support and building of recovery capital.

Limitations of the studies

There are common limitations across all of the studies reviewed. These are typical of qualitative research and include: 1) Small sample sizes; 2) Unable to establish causality because the focus was on eliciting participant experiences; and 3) Non-generalizability of findings. Non-generalizability of findings is relevant in that most of the studies are from the United States and results may not translate elsewhere due to differences in prison systems but also applies at the program level, i.e. the experiences of one set of participants cannot be generalised to other potential program users.

Selection bias is also a limitation across many of the studies. For example, Pleggenkuhle et al. ( 2016 ) note that participants in their study may have been more motivated than other inmates. Hunter et al. ( 2016 ) recognise that their study lacked a comparison group and Miller et al. ( 2016 ) identify that their control group was not randomized. There is a need for more longitudinal data (Elison et al. 2016 ; Gilbert and Elley 2015 ; Hunter et al., 2016 ) and more data on female reentry experience (Angell et al. 2014 ). Gender issues related to program content were raised in only two of the papers reviewed (Johnson et al. 2015 and Miller et al. 2016 ). Moreover, the findings of Johnson et al.’s ( 2015 ) study are limited, as they were unable to establish causality because participants were also engaged with mental health and substance use disorder treatment services. Zortman et al. ( 2016 ) identify that there are limitations to the validity of their data because participant responses were self-reported and there was a lack of standardization across their research sites.

Description of method of analysis varied between papers and in one case was absent (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ). It was evident nevertheless that in all cases a variation of thematic analysis was used, which is arguably the most common method of initial analysis in qualitative research (Braun and Clarke 2006 ). Some papers then applied a theoretical approach to the discussion of the analysis such as an interpretative phenomenology (Elison et al. 2016 ) or a strengths based approach (Hunter et al. 2016 ). Greater uniformity in qualitative evaluation methods is desirable in bringing together results from similar studies.

Limitations of the review

There is limited qualitative program evaluation research available and standardization of qualitative evaluation and inclusion is a work in progress. There were some differences in programs that have not been examined in detail in our analysis though we did find similar elements in the program evaluations included. Data analysis methods applied in the qualitative evaluations reviewed were forms of thematic or grounded theory analysis. Our systematic review analysis has treated all methods similarly and focused on reported results. More consistency is needed in qualitative methods used in evaluation studies to enable comparisons and review of the literature.

This is the first systematic review of qualitative evaluations of reentry programs. Findings suggest that access to social support, housing and employment; the interpersonal skills of case workers; personalized approaches to case management; and continuity of care throughout the pre-release and post-release period are the key social and structural factors in program success. These factors impact on other measures of program efficacy such as reduced substance use and protecting against re-incarceration. The role of caseworkers as an advocate and advisor for program participants plays an important role in program success, as respectful communication combined with practical support was identified as beneficial in all papers. For women, the relational aspects of caseworker support such as trust and rapport are critical to program participation and relapse prevention. Continuity of individualised care goes some way to addressing the risk factors associated with reentry by assisting clients in establishing ‘recovery capital’. This includes accessing and maintaining housing and employment and providing an ongoing therapeutic relationship and connection to pro-social relationships. Where sustainable recovery is achieved, this can be transformative, resulting in reintegration into the community, long term desistance from substance use and crime and improved psychological health (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ).

Implications for public policy

The review indicates that comprehensive reentry programs that address the full range of social and structural issues via individualised support from case managers can be effective. Participants report benefit from reentry programs where a combination of practical resources and empathic support is provided spanning from the pre-release to the post-release period. The need for integrated, rather than crisis-driven support, and gender specific health and social support services to support reentry is also indicated.

Acknowledgements

Not applicable

The research was funded with a Health Futures Development Grant from the University of Technology Sydney.

Availability of data and materials

Authors’ contributions.

SK, ES and SWard conceived and supervised the review. SR undertook searches. ES, SK, SR reviewed search results. ES, SK, SR and SWayland conducted final review analyses. SR, SK, ES led the writing. SWard and SWayland contributed to revision of manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Approval to conduct the study was provided by the JH&FMHS Human Research Ethics Committee (JH File Number: G835/12) and UTS Human Research Ethics Committee (ETH15-0080).

Consent for publication

All authors of the manuscript have read and agree to its content and are accountable for all aspects of the accuracy and integrity of the manuscript in accordance with ICMJE criteria.

All authors agree that the article is original, has not already been published in a journal, and is not currently under consideration by another journal.

All authors agree to the terms of the SpringerOpen Copyright and License Agreement, and, where applicable, Open Data policy.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Contributor Information

Sacha Kendall, Email: [email protected] .

Sarah Redshaw, Email: [email protected] .

Stephen Ward, Email: [email protected] .

Sarah Wayland, Email: [email protected] .

Elizabeth Sullivan, Email: [email protected] .

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Reentry philosophies, approaches, and challenges

by Marvin L. Astrada

Competing notions of crime and punishment have shaped the administration of criminal justice in the United States ever since the Quakers established the Walnut Street Prison in 1773 in Philadelphia, creating the first penitentiary in the country. Since then, the form and substance of criminal punishment have evolved from penitence, to rehabilitation, to retribution. From the mid-1970s onward, public policy has emphasized punishment and retribution. The result today is a burgeoning prison population, massive state and federal expenditures on the prison system, and a growing realization that releasing offenders without support mechanisms creates a revolving-prison-door phenomenon.

In recent years, reentry programs have emerged as a way to address the challenges of reintegrating ex-offenders into society and, increasingly, as a tool for combatting mass incarceration and reducing persistent recidivism rates. Reentry programs are managed by the court and designed to provide broad, comprehensive support to ex-offenders in building a productive life outside prison. This article provides an overview of reentry philosophy and approaches, and discusses some of the challenges of measuring the success of reentry programs.

The Problem

Statistics from the Bureau of Justice (BJS) indicate that, in 2012, the overall prison population in the U.S. was approximately 1,570,400.1 Although the overall nationwide prison population rate has declined and the rate of release continues to increase, data from 2005 to 2010 show that recidivism is a tremendous challenge.2 In 2005, 67.8 percent of 404,638 state prisoners released in 30 states were arrested within three years of release, and 76.6 percent were arrested within five years.3 In the 23 of those 30 states with available data on inmates who returned to prison, 49.7 percent of inmates had either a parole or probation violation or an arrest for a new offense within three years, and 55.1 percent had a parole or probation violation or an arrest within five years.4

The BJS has estimated that nearly three-quarters of all released prisoners will be rearrested within five years of their release — and about six in ten will be reconvicted.5 Furthermore, people of color are overwhelmingly encumbered with the profoundly negative consequences of having been incarcerated, because they disproportionately constitute the majority of the incarcerated population.6

In 2014, “1,561,500 people were under the control of state or federal correctional authorities. . . . This represents almost a one percent decline from the previous year, yet it still remains [the case] that almost one in every 100 Americans remains in prison. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission . . . suggests that if the current trends continue, ‘approximately 6.6 percent of all persons born in the United States in 2001 [could] serve time in state or federal prison during their lifetimes.’”7 The growing rate of offenders transitioning into the community; high prospects of re-arrest, re-conviction, and re-incarceration; offenders’ limited or ill preparedness to reenter the community; and communities’ inability or lack of capacity to provide support during the transition exacerbate the profound challenges communities face in attempting to curb recidivism.

The recidivism rate has remained virtually unchanged for the last decade or more.8 Of the two-thirds of former inmates who are re-arrested within three years of release, more than half will eventually be re-incarcerated. Additionally, more parolees are returning to prison than ever before: about one-third of all prison admissions nationwide are parole violators returned to prison for new crimes or technical violations.9 By some estimates, ex-offenders account for about 15 to 20 percent of all arrests among adults, although this varies considerably by state and type of criminal behavior.10

The costs to communities are high. The sheer volume of offenders being released and unsuccessfully reintegrated into the community negatively affects the structural integrity and stability of host communities, straining public health, public housing, homelessness, mental health services, community and family relationships, and civic participation. Furthermore, the costs associated with incarceration and re-incarcerating offenders are putting immense pressure on already overextended state budgets.11

The struggle to successfully transition from prison to society is not a novel problem. The increasing scale of the problem, however, has presented new and serious challenges.12 Over the last two decades the U.S. “has commenced the largest multi-year discharge of prisoners from state and federal custody in history.”13 This exploding population of ex-offenders makes reducing rates of re-offending and recidivism more difficult.14 Lack of oversight, poor transitional preparation, and a lack of access to substantive social, financial, and educational resources and opportunities such as affordable housing, gainful employment, physical and mental health care, and treatment programs for substance abuse are serious problems that ex-offenders face.15 Over “650,000 people are released from prison each year,” and often they return to the “high-crime, poverty-stricken communities from which they came, still battling . . . intractable poverty, educational and job training deficits, [and] drug addictions or mental illnesses that contributed to their criminality in the first instance.”16

There is growing realization that releasing offenders without providing support mechanisms creates a revolving-prison-door phenomenon. Academics and professionals have begun to explore alternatives to focusing strictly on retribution, with a particular focus on offenders’ release and subsequent (failure of) reintegration into the community. Although the goal of the modern criminal justice system, broadly speaking, has been “to control crime with justice,” some argue that “prosecutors must look beyond simple ‘control’ to recognize that public safety may be achieved with tools other than imprisonment.”17 Looking beyond “control” led to a focus on post-incarceration. Employing recidivism rates as a quantifiable measure of correctional programs’ success and effectiveness, many analysts found that a large percentage of offenders were returning to prison. This phenomenon prompted, in part, further research into post-incarceration and the effects of a purely retributive ethos. Some advocates claim that reentry programs offer a much-needed alternative tool “other than imprisonment” to address these challenges and more effectively administer justice.18

Reentry, The Courts, and The Administration of Justice

Since the early 2000s, the courts have begun to reevaluate the role of the judge and other major criminal justice players, including prosecutors and defenders, in the administration of justice. In light of the crucial role that successful offender release and integration into the community assumes in reducing the prison population — and with the realization that recidivism rates have not been optimally reduced — courts began to consider and implement reentry programs as a way to help reduce recidivism and stem the tide of mass incarceration.19

The concept of reentry encompasses all activities and programming geared toward better preparing ex-offenders to permanently return to the community.20 Reentry programs “may be broadly defined as the processes and experiences associated with offenders’ incarceration and release from prison, jail, or some form of secure confinement.”21 The logic of a reentry program is relatively straightforward: Keeping ex-offenders out of prison helps stem the growth of the prison population.22

In the reentry context, the court is part of a team-based approach to offender processing, release, and reintegration.23 Judges, defense lawyers, prosecutors, and probation officers work together,

bringing their diverse professional expertise collectively to bear on solving the problems on which the program is focused. As a team, the stakeholders have better access to institutional resources and information and consequently can better shepherd participants through the bureaucratic obstacles [that] often stymie successful reintegration. Joint problem solving and resource sharing among stakeholders in the criminal justice system is a marked departure from the courts’ normal way of doing business.24

Reentry programs thus reflect local conditions and the local criminal justice ethos, and are thoroughly affected by local circumstances. Reentry programs may be adapted, refined, reconfigured, and repurposed by various courts to reflect unique local circumstances.

Although local circumstances, such as legal culture and philosophy, play a substantial role in how reentry is conceptualized and implemented by the courts, reentry programs are rooted in a common philosophical-legal approach that informs how success is perceived and measured. Generally speaking, reentry is premised on the notion that a formal and comprehensive transition process after release from prison is necessary to address an ex-offender’s basic survival needs, such as safe housing, gainful employment, and healthcare, as well as skills-based need such as treatment, literacy, and job training, to prevent a revolving-prison-door syndrome.25 Reentry is a “therapeutically oriented judicial approach to providing court supervision and appropriate treatment to offenders”26 to effectuate this transition process.

Some criminal justice scholars view reentry programs as reconfiguring the notion of rehabilitation. That is, rehabilitation, according to some commentators, “with an eye to reentry, has been repackaged, not as a way to improve the individual offender for his or her own sake, but rather as a way to improve public safety for all of society.”27 This aspect of reentry programs, some advocates contend, begins to address some of the failures of a purely retributive paradigm, which focuses mainly on punishment of the individual offender. While punishment plays a fundamental role in the administration of justice, reentry programs focus on the challenges ex-offenders face during post-incarceration, taking into account the well-being of the offender and of the community that he or she will return to. Reentry programs thus attempt to provide therapeutic rehabilitative programs to enhance an ex-offender’s prospects of permanent reintegration into the community after punishment, to concomitantly help the ex-offender build a sustainable, productive life, and to improve the well-being of the overall community. The community benefits when ex-offenders become contributing members of society who do not commit new crimes. For this reason, some advocates contend that reentry programs are an important tool for courts and communities to employ when addressing the pressing challenges posed by the mass release of ex-offenders into the community.28

The recent shift from decades of retributive criminal justice to more “non-brick-and-mortar social control options”29 means that some courts are more willing to view reentry as a viable means to address the collateral consequences of being an ex-offender. Collateral consequences entail legal “sanctions and restrictions that limit or prohibit people with criminal records from accessing employment, occupational licensing, housing, voting, education, and other opportunities.”30 Recently highlighted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Padilla v. Kentucky — “holding that defendants have a Sixth Amendment right to be informed of a collateral consequence (in Padilla, deportation) attaching to a guilty plea”31 — these collateral consequences make it very difficult for ex-offenders to productively move on with their lives post-incarceration.

The criminal justice system devotes considerable resources to investigating and punishing crime.32 Reentry programs seek to prevent ex-offenders from reoffending and returning to prison. Sustaining the present trajectory of the exponentially growing prison population — a revolving-prison-door phenomenon wherein offenders are serving longer sentences and often returning to prison, and governments are devoting substantial economic resources to manage revolving-door-prison populations — is not an economically viable nor desirable option. Reducing recidivism and focusing on the endpoint of the correctional process, reentry advocates contend, constructively addresses the problem of mass incarceration by shrinking the number of ex-offenders who return to the courts and the prison system.33 Given the present rates of incarceration, release, and recidivism, it seems to be in the best interests of the judiciary and the broader community to create and support effective and efficient reentry processes.

How a Reentry Program Works — Issues & Challenges

The state and the federal courts have implemented reentry programs that reflect local contexts and community issues and are specifically designed to comprehensively address the challenges ex-offenders face during post-conviction.34 Attempts to clearly define, operationalize, and measure the efficacy of a reentry program highlight its complex nature and the important role that the courts assume in the process. If reentry is more than simply programmatic in nature, and encompasses a comprehensive process, does it possess an empirically sound basis for establishing programs geared toward reintegration? Are reentry programs overly broad to the point where such programs are not monetarily feasible?

Some courts view reentry holistically rather than as a single ad-hoc program.35 In a holistic approach, the courts and criminal justice professionals actively participate in reentry efforts, which may better serve the goal of “the effective integration of former federal [and state] prisoners into our communities and the reduction of recidivism.”36 Here, reentry is not based solely or mainly on objective quantitative measures and methodology. Indeed, some commentators qualitatively characterize reentry as a movement, an approach, or a continuing process that begins at the point of release and continues afterwards. Assessing the strength or weakness of reentry programs, and whether they “work,” will depend in part on whether one views reentry programs from a qualitative or quantitive perspective.

The reentry paradigm “builds on the notion that the transition from prison to the community does not happen automatically and without preparation. Reentry strategies encourage the establishment of broad linkages that support offender transitions and community partnerships and penetrate through and beyond prison walls.”37 Reentry thus focuses on the socioeconomic environment that offenders will be released into, and what the courts can do to help offenders successfully reintegrate.38

Reentry programs generally take a holistic rehabilitative approach that recognizes and addresses the complex factors that directly impact successful reintegration — such as socioeconomic status, education, age, mental health, substance abuse, and sustained employment — with the expectation that programs designed to address these challenges will improve the ex-offender’s chances for successful reintegration. Reentry programs take into account the fact that ex-offenders likely “are less educated, less likely to be gainfully employed, and more likely to have a history of mental illness or substance abuse — all of which have been shown to be risk factors for recidivism.”39

Some scholars contend that reentry programs help reduce recidivism because the courts assume such a proactive role in the post-conviction period.40 Traditionally, “the role of the judge in a criminal case is to oversee courtroom proceedings relating to a defendant’s guilt or innocence and the appropriate disposition of the case.”41 In problem-solving and reentry courts, the judge is an active participant, which allow the courts to assume a different role in the administration of justice. Under a reentry approach, judges can set and monitor an offender’s post-conviction agenda and can impose explicit conditions on an offender’s behavior with directives such as “do not use drugs,” “get regular drug testing,” or “go to treatment.”42

In this way, the court employs a mix of graduated sanctions and incentives to influence and redirect offenders’ behavior and to reinforce success if such changes are effectuated.43 Sanctions may include community service, increased supervision levels, ordering drug testing or treatment, or short periods of re-incarceration. Incentives may include various rewards, such as a reduction of length of stay in prison in return for satisfactory progress in various educational, vocational, and drug treatment programs and work assignments, and for good behavior.44 These incentives and sanctions may help ex-offenders better navigate the complex challenges associated with release and reintegration. The court thus assumes an active and comprehensive role rather than a passive presence in an ex-offender’s attempt to reintegrate into the community.

Like other problem-solving courts, reentry courts include problem-solving and therapeutic components in supporting an ex-offender’s planned transition into the community. The court tailors a reentry plan to fit an offender’s unique risks and needs and attempts to address the specific issues and challenges an offender will face upon release from prison, such as employment and substance abuse treatment, to maximize successful reintegration.45 To help accomplish this, the court must be able to draw upon a range of supportive and supervision resources to implement the plan and must exercise the authority and discretion needed to efficiently and effectively impose sanctions and incentives.46

Does Reentry Work?

Defining and measuring success are major points of contention in the reentry debate among advocates and critics — on and off the bench. Some reentry program advocates subscribe to or emphasize a qualitative approach, stressing the value of intangible and humanistic benefits that accrue from reentry; a qualitative argument is based on the idea that success cannot be measured solely or mainly in quantitative terms. Some critics, on the other hand, approach reentry from a quantitative perspective; successful outcomes are objectively measured via empirically data-driven, cost-benefit analysis, and evidence-based practices rooted in statistical analysis.

The literature on reentry programs is scattered in criminological, sociological, and psychological publications, although much of it can be found in state and federal agency and government reports.47 Generally speaking, the literature has a pronounced sociological, rather than a psychological, bent. Methodologically, this has resulted in focusing less on the individual offender, treatment provider, and program characteristics when measuring outcomes and instead assessing programs using recidivism outcome studies. A program is generally classified as one that works, does not work, or is promising ; the “what works” literature tends to be program-based, as opposed to principles-based.48 The largest and most influential “what works” study in the U.S., Crime Prevention: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Promising , was conducted by the University of Maryland and funded by the U.S. Justice Department in 1997.49 The report attempted to identify effective reentry programs by creating scientific scoring systems to evaluate programs based on whether they can be proven to have an empirical impact in reducing recidivism.50

When evaluating reentry programs, it is important to note that how recidivism is conceptualized and defined will directly affect evaluation results. Recidivism is “often defined as the re-arrest, reconviction, or re-incarceration of an ex-offender within a given time frame.”51 Recidivism, when viewed critically, provokes debates about the overarching social, economic, and political conditions associated with crime.

There are two general competing views about what recidivism means or should mean: 1) recidivism is viewed broadly as constituting any new contact with the criminal justice system, and 2) recidivism is more narrowly construed as commission of a particular type of new crime, such as a felony, resulting in a new sentence.52 What one includes in the definition of recidivism has a substantial impact on the rate of recidivism.53 Recidivism also can be viewed in terms of the individual criminal; for instance, one could conclude that a particular offender is resistant to crime-preventing mechanisms. Another view is that recidivism is the direct result of debilitating structural socioeconomic conditions conducive to criminal conduct.54 Some commentators contend that these different definitions of recidivism and the resulting variation in rates make recidivism an insufficient measure of the effectiveness of reentry, since reentry programs aim for permanent reintegration, which is more than merely remaining arrest-free for a specified time period.

Another problem with using recidivism rates as a measure for reentry is that of sample size: Programs are localized, and therefore often quite small. They do not provide sufficient sample sizes to generate generalizable conclusions. Some studies have focused on assessing the effectiveness of a standalone program, while others have taken a comprehensive approach by evaluating the effectiveness of a program statewide or nationwide. Some studies have demonstrated successful outcomes, others have found no discernible effects, and others have found a mix of positive and negative findings.55

Some advocates of reentry programs contend that to accurately measure successful reintegration, researchers need to build into their evaluations “measures of attachment to a variety of social institutions. Research shows that these factors are related to long-term criminal desistance,” such as whether or not programs address underlying issues of substance abuse, sobriety, and attendance at treatment program.56 To better gauge the effectiveness and success of reentry, it has also been suggested that researchers keep track of whether or not programs help offenders become involved in community activities, in a church, or in offender support groups or victim sensitivity sessions.57 There are many outcomes that reentry programs strive to improve upon, and these are usually not operationalized and measured in traditional recidivism-only outcome evaluations.58

To empirically measure reentry programs’ relative success or failure, some reentry advocates suggest narrowing the scope and focus of such programs by defining them as programs that either specifically focus on the transition from prison to community or initiate treatment in a prison setting and link up with a community program to provide continuity of care.59 Within this broad definition, only programs that have an outcome evaluation are included. A narrow definition, however, discounts programs that have not been formally evaluated, do not specifically focus on the transition process, or do not begin in the community.60

As noted earlier, reentry programs are inherently local. There is no universal reentry approach or singular program model; the structure of a program varies depending on local needs, resources, and statutory frameworks. Programs vary significantly by type, number of phases, treatment modality employed, duration of treatment, location of treatment, presence of aftercare, risk level of offender, and type of treatment provider.61 This makes quantitative assessment of reentry very difficult. Furthermore, because the authority for post-prison supervision is often not vested within the judicial branch, reentry courts operate based on a variety of approaches, each consistent with local statutory frameworks. For instance, in New York City, an administrative law judge — with authority from the parole board — has managed reentry participants within a community court setting. In Fort Wayne, Ind., the Indiana Parole Commission has authorized judges to supervise returning prisoners on the commission’s behalf.62 In each model, the court and the offender work cooperatively to address the risks associated with release from prison and to improve successful reintegration.

The debate over the effectiveness of rehabilitation efforts reaches back for decades. After Robert Martinson published his influential article in 1974 asserting that rehabilitative programs were not producing results,63 some critics attempted to refute the allegation and demonstrate that treatment efforts could be effective. A key element of such attempts was the notion that empirical data should guide the correctional enterprise, as opposed to common sense or politics.64 The focus on scientific data to inform risk assessment ushered in the present practice of evaluating rehabilitative programs using an Evidence-Based Practice approach (EBP). Although recently embraced by the criminal justice system, EBP has its origins in 19th-century medical practice. More than a century later, the medical definition of EBP — “the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions . . . integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research”65 — is very much in line with the therapeutic, problem-solving, and comprehensive reentry approach. EBP “has shifted the focus of supervision and services to the factors that are most likely to impact . . . involvement in criminal behavior . . . targeting antisocial thought patterns, peer associations, and other dynamic risk factors using approaches research has shown generally reduce the likelihood of future criminal behavior.”66

Many states, relying upon EBP, have initiated program reforms aimed at reducing recidivism.67 At the center of EBP is a commitment to understanding the individual and using a strategy that provides the best option for achieving the desired result.68 EBP, however, also has its critics. For example, some commentators contend that EBP has been simplified to a “this worked for most, so it should work for you” model that erroneously expects all offenders to respond to the same mode of service delivery.69 This approach ignores an offender’s unique characteristics, circumstances, and priorities for successful reintegration. While it is the case that many offenders have similar risk factors — such as drug addiction — it is also the case that each offender’s specific circumstances require different treatment responses based on unique characteristics, including race, ethnicity, age, sex, gender, and mental health.70

The debate over the success of reentry programs probably will not cease even when more and better empirical data becomes available. Instead, the discussion is likely to focus on the extent and cost of success. A reentry program’s success, for example, from a qualitative perspective, could be defined as any observable reduction in recidivism. An observable reduction can constitute a single program participant who does not re-offend after completing a reentry program. Whether the benefit of having a single program participant successfully avoid re-incarceration merits the financial costs of a reentry program is likely to remain a serious point of contention and debate. Recidivism is thus a “complicated criminological and social concept . . . measuring the recidivism-reducing effect of any program is challenged by the complexity of interdependent variables that affect the measure.”71

Whether viewed expansively or narrowly, reentry programs reflect a significant departure from how the courts have traditionally administered justice.72 Within the realm of criminal law, the courts have traditionally limited involvement to fact finding and application of the law from a detached, procedural standpoint. Reentry courts are essentially problem-solving courts that require court involvement throughout the offender’s experience with the criminal justice system. Such courts attempt to actively, effectively, and efficiently use limited resources to address particular problems that offenders face when attempting to reintegrate into the community. The development of reentry courts builds upon the claimed success of problem-solving courts in reducing the recidivism rates for the various at-risk clients they target: drug addicts, the mentally ill, the homeless, and juveniles, among others.73

At a time when most communities are hard-pressed to fund equally important societal needs, such as education, infrastructure, and health care, the allocation of funds for reentry programs will most likely be subject to contentious debate concerning cost-benefit analyses, as well as differing views as to how ex-offenders should be supported during post-conviction. But the costs to society of mass incarceration and recidivism are also very real and escalating. More empirical study must be conducted to provide better guidance to local communities struggling with these challenges, with the caveat that there be a degree of flexibility in determining how to evaluate successful reentry programs.

For now, judges, working in tandem with support staff and key actors in the criminal justice system, especially prosecutors and defenders, may have a unique opportunity to enhance an ex-offender’s prospects of permanent reintegration into the community by actively participating in programs that “go beyond” punishment. Reentry programs of all types can thus be viewed as experimental legal laboratories attempting to mollify the pernicious effects of mass incarceration and recidivism. Regardless of the controversy surrounding reentry programs, as presently conceptualized and applied, they may provide judges and other key criminal justice actors with additional tools to play a more proactive, positive, and expansive role.

1. E. Ann Carson & Daniela Golinelli, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Prisoners in 2012: Trends in Admissions and Releases 1991–2012, at 1–3 (2013).

2. leslie helmus et al., absolute recidivism rates predicted by static-99r and static-2002r sex offender risk assessment tools vary across samples: a meta-analysis , 39 crim. just. & behavior 1148 (2012); see also u.s. sentencing comm’n, recidivism among federal offenders: a comprehensive overview 5 (2016) (finding that federal offenders recidivate at an alarming pace: 49.3 percent were rearrested within eight years of their release from prison)., 3. matthew r. durose, alexia d. cooper, & howard n. snyder, recidivism of prisoners released in 30 states in 2005: patterns from 2005 to 2010 (2014), p. 1. see also joel m. caplan, parole system anomie: conflicting models of casework and surveillance , 70 fed. probation 32 (dec. 2006); matthew g. rowland, assessing the case for formal recognition and expansion of federal problem-solving courts , 80 fed. prob. 3, 12 (2016) (finding recidivism in the state system has been reported to be as much as 68 percent within three years of release from prison)., 5. see nathan james, offender reentry: correctional statistics, reintegration into the community, and recidivism 1–4 (2015), available at https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/rl34287.pdf ., 6. william hubbard, remarks on collateral consequences of mass incarceration , 2 crim. l. prac. 10 (2014)., 7. lisa a. rich, a federal certificate of rehabilitation program: providing federal ex-offenders more opportunity for successful reentry , 7 ala. c.r. & c.l.l. rev. 249, 251 (2016)., 8. durose et al.,  supra note 3; see also john larivee, prisoner reentry: a public safety opportunity , 37 prosecutor 43 (2003); jason clark, incarceration, recidivism, and rehabilitation: reducing risk and recidivism , 75 tex. bar. j. 612 (2012)., 9. the oxford handbook of sentencing and corrections 685 (joan petersilia & kevin r. reitz eds., 2015)., 10. doris layton mackenzie, sentencing and corrections in the 21st century: setting the stage for the future (2001), available at https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/189106-2.pdf ., 11. chris mai & ram subramanian, vera inst. of justice, the price of prisons: examining state spending trends, 20102015 (2017), https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends/legacy_downloads/the-price-of-prisons-2015state-spending-trends.pdf ; see also u.s. dep’t of educ., state and local expenditures on corrections and education (2016), https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/other/expenditures-corrections-education/brief.pdf ., 12. see generally doulas a. berman, reorienting progressive perspectives for twenty-first century punishment realities , 3 harv. l. & pol’y rev. online (2008)., 13. anthony c. thompson, navigating the hidden obstacles to ex-offender reentry , 45 b.c.l. rev. 255, 256 (2004)., 14. id. at 257., 15. see marta nelson et al., vera inst. of justice, the first month out: postincarceration experiences in new york city (1999); see stephen metraux & dennis p. culhane, homeless shelter use & re-incarceration following prison release: assessing the risk , 3 criminology & pub. pol’y 139 (2004)., 16. jessica s. henry, the second chance act of 2007 , 45 crim. l. bull. art. 3, at 4 (2009), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfmabstract_id=2344739. , 17. charles j. hynes, prosecution backs alternative to prison for drug addicts , 19 crim. just. 28 (2004)., 18. see reginald a. wilkinson, et al., prison reform through offender reentry: a partnership between courts and corrections , 24 pace l. rev. 609, 612 (2004)., 19. see, e.g. , keith o’brien & sarah lawrence, implementing a reentry program according to best practices, mass. exec. office of pub. safety (2007), available at http://www.mass.gov/eopss/docs/eops/publications/implementing-a-reentry-program-according-to-best-practices-march-2007.pdf ; timothy hughes & doris james wilson, u.s. dep’t of justice, bureau of justice statistics, reentry trends in the united states (2002), available at http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/reentry.pdf ; stephen e. vance, federal reentry court programs: a summary of recent evaluations , 75 fed. prob. 64, 65, 72 (2011)., 20. see rich, supra note 7, at 249., 21. edward e. rhine & anthony c. thompson, the reentry movement in corrections: resiliency, fragility and prospects , 47 crim. l. bull. art. 1, 2 ( 2011)., 22. see melissa a. knopp, breaking the cycle: ohio reentry courts , 41 ohio n.u. l. rev. 747 (2015) (“with the latest criminal justice reform efforts focused on reducing ballooning state corrections budgets and the number of inmates in state prisons, policy makers have been more willing to reassess the past punitive approaches that heavily relied on imprisonment as the principal crime control strategy.”)., 23. see, e.g. , michael c. dorf & jeffrey a. fagan, problem-solving courts: from innovation to institutionalization , 40 am. crim. l. rev. 1501 (2003)., 24. gottschall & armour, infra note 32, at 38–40; see seiter & kadela, infra note 50, at 368; see also hamilton, infra note 55, and d.j. farole, the harlem parole reentry court evaluation: implementation and preliminary impacts (2003). note that bjs data from 2000-2013 indicate that the majority of offenders on community supervision are on probation (on average 84 percent between 2000-2013)., 25. see faye s. taxman, the offender & reentry: supporting active participation in reintegration , 68 fed. prob. 31 (2004)., 26. knopp, supra note 22., 27. see henry, supra note 16, at 2; see also james m. byrne & don hummer, prisoner reentry — examining the role of the police in reentry partnership initiatives , 68 fed. prob. 62 (2004)., 28. see, e.g. , berman, supra note 12; vivian nixon et al., life capacity beyond reentry: a critical examination of racism and prisoner reentry reform in the u.s. , 2 race/ethnicity: multidisciplinary global contexts 21 (2008), available at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252430/pdf ; thompson, supra note 13, at 256–57., 29. wayne a. logan, informal collateral consequences , 88 wash. l. rev. 1103, 1104 (2013)., 30. the council of state governments justice center, national inventory of collateral consequences of conviction (2012, 2017), available at https://niccc.csgjusticecenter.org/, 31. logan, supra note 29, at 1103–05., 32. joan gottschall & molly armour, second chance: establishing a reentry program in the northern district of illinois , 5 depaul j. for soc. just. 31, 67 (2011). examples include: funding “police and other investigative agencies; public prosecutors; taxpayer-funded defender services (which represent the vast majority of defendants accused of crime); the judicial system, including judges and their staffs, court clerks, stenographers and marshals and other court security personnel; pretrial and probation officers; addiction counselors; and the enormous state and federal prison system.” id; see also laura knollenberg & valerie a. martin, community reentry following prison: a process evaluation of the accelerated community entry program , 72 fed. prob. 54 (2008)., 33. see jeremy travis and christy visher, eds., prisoner reentry and crime in america (2005)., 34. for examples of federal courts that have implemented reentry programs, such as the district of oregon, the district of massachusetts, the western district of michigan, the southern district of ohio, the middle district of florida, and the eastern district of pennsylvania, see hon. michael j. newman & matthew c. moschella, the benefits and operations of federal reentry courts , fed. law. 26, 26–35 (2017), available at http://www.fedbar.org/resources_1/federal-lawyer-magazine/2017/december/the-benefits-and-operations-of-federalreentry-courts.aspx ; stephen e. vance, federal reentry court programs: a summary of recent evaluations , 75 fed. prob. 64 (2011), available at http://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/75_2_11_0.pdf . for a listing of various state reentry court programs, see state by state listing of re-entry programs for prisoners , lionheart found., http://lionheart.org/prison/state-by-state-listing-of-re-entry-programs-for-prisoners/ (last visited june 14, 2018)., 35. see, e.g. , re-entry court , u.s. prob. off.: eastern district of pa., available at http://www.paep.uscourts.gov/re-entry-court (listing the description and materials pertaining to the supervision to aid reentry (star) program in philadelphia, pa, overseen by the third circuit court of appeals)., 36. see gottschall & armour, supra note 32., 37. rhine & thompson, supra note 21, at 18. see also patrick j. carr, the new parochialism: the implications of the beltway case for arguments concerning informal social control , 108 am. j. soc. 1249 (2003); april pattavina, et al., an examination of citizen involvement in crime prevention in high-risk versus low to moderate risk neighborhoods , 52 crime & delinq. 203 (2006); and robert j. sampson & stephen w. raudenbush, seeing disorder: neighborhood stigma and the social construction of “broken windows,” 67 soc. psych. q. 319 (2004)., 38. rhine & thompson, supra note 21, at 8. see also joan petersilia, prisoner reentry — what works in prisoner reentry reviewing and questioning the evidence , 68 fed. prob. 4 (2004); gordon bazemore & jeanne stinchcomb, prisoner reentry — a civic engagement model of reentry: involving community through service and restorative justice , 68 fed. prob. 14 (2004)., 39. see james, supra note 5., 40. see shadd maruna & thomas p. lebel, welcome home examining the reentry court concept from a strengths-based perspective , 4 w. criminology rev. 91 (2003)., 41. a.b.a., reentry courts , 17 crim. just. 15 (2002)., 42. see martha neil, 2 federal judges work with ex-cons in chicago re-entry program , a.b.a. j. (aug. 16, 2012), http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/federal_judges_work_with_ex-cons_in_chicago_re-entry_program/news/article/judges_and_the_administrative_state/icn=sidebar&ici=bottom ., 43. a.b.a, supra note 41., 44. ga. dep’t of corr., performance incentive credit (2017), available at http://dcor.state.ga.us/sites/all/themes/gdc/pdf/pic_v032017.pdf, 45. see alaska prisoner reentry task force, five-year prisoner reentry strategic plan, 2011-2016, available at http://www.correct.state.ak.us/tskforce/documents/five-year-prisoner-reentry-plan.pdf ., 46. keith o’brien & sarah lawrence, implementing a reentry program according to best practices (2007), available at http://www.mass.gov/eopss/docs/eops/publications/implementing-a-reentry-program-according-to-best-practices-march-2007.pdf., 47. two distinct literatures that have emerged using distinct disciplinary traditions and methodologies for assessing reentry and “what works.” these differences have evolved over the last two to three decades due to disciplinary training (mainly psychology versus criminology) and the methods each discipline has adopted. each literature, while finding some support for the efficacy of a reentry approach to criminal justice, nonetheless have produced different conclusions based on different foci of analysis. petersilia, supra note 38, at 4–5., 48. id. at 6., 49. lawrence w. sherman, et al., preventing crime: what works, what doesn’t, what’s promising 6–12 (1997), available at https://www.ncjrs.gov/works/ ., 50. see richard p. seiter & karen r. kadela, prisoner reentry: what works, what does not, and what is promising , 49 crime & delinq., 360, 370–72 (2003). the researchers developed the following criteria to determine whether a crime prevention program was effective or ineffective:, what works : “for a program to be considered ‘working,’ there must be at least two level 3 evaluations with significance tests indicating that the intervention was effective, and the preponderance of the remaining evidence must support that conclusion.” id. at 372., what does not work : “for a program to be coded as ‘not working,’ there must be at least two level 3 evaluations with statistical significance indicating the ineffectiveness of the program, and the preponderance of the remaining evidence must support the same conclusion.” id. at 372., promising : “these are programs for which the level of certainty from available evidence is too low to support generalizable conclusions. however, there is some empirical basis for predicting that further research could support such conclusions, such as programs are found effective in at least one level 3 evaluation, and the preponderance of the remaining evidence supports that conclusion.” id. at 372–73., unknown : “any program not classified in one of the three previous categories is defined as having unknown effects.” id. at 373., 51. james, supra note 5, at 5; see also robert weisberg, meanings & measures of recidivism, 87 s. cal. l. rev. 785, 786–87 (2014). as noted by weisberg, stepping outside the parameters of recidivism so defined, one can, for example, limit the definition of a recidivist act to a new criminal act, a new prison-eligible felony, or to a technical violation of parole. id. at 786. one can also lengthen or shorten a given time frame; thus, the definition of recidivism is “a matter of [being a] legal concept and [having] criminological significance.” id. one can also question a case wherein “a technical violation was charged to see if the act was actually a new crime that the prosecutor just chose to treat as an administrative violation, for ease of proof and procedure. that approach would have raised difficult fact-finding issues, so the definition of recidivism remains[s] contingent on empirical uncertainty.” id. at 786-87., 52. see james, supra note 5, at 5-6., 54. see stephanie slifer, once a criminal, always a criminal , cbs news (apr. 23, 2014, 7:35 am), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/once-a-criminal-always-a-criminal/ ., 55. for examples of varying studies and results, see z. k. hamilton, adapting to bad news: lessons from the harlem parole reentry court , 50 j. of offender rehabilitation, 385–410 (2011); j. a. wilson & r. davis, good intentions meet hard realities: an evaluation of the project greenlight reentry program , 5 criminology & pub. pol’y, 303–38 (2006); j.a. bouffard & l.e. bergeron, reentry works , 44 j. of offender rehabilitation 1–29 (2006); p.k. lattimore, d.m. steffey & c.a. visher, prisoner reentry in the first decade of the twenty-first century , 5 victims & offenders 253–67 (2010); j.a. inciardi, et al., an effective model of prison-based treatment for drug-involved offenders , 27 j. of drug issues, 261 (1997)., 56. petersilia, supra note 38, at 7., 57. see jamie yoon & jessica nickel, reentry partnerships: a guide for states & faithbased & community organizations, council of state gov’ts justice ctr., n.y., n.y. (2008), https://www.bja.gov/publications/csg_reentry_partnership.pdf ., 58. petersilia, supra note 38, at 7; see also henry, supra note 16, at 8; arthur j. lurigio et al., the effects of serious mental illness on offender reentry , 68 fed. prob. 45 (2004); james e. robertson, civil disabilities and citizenship: the new color line , 21 correctional l. rep., 57, 63 (2010); wendy s. still, san francisco realignment: raising the bar for criminal justice in california , 25 fed. sent’g rep. (2013)., 59. anna crayton et al., urban inst., partnering with jails to improve reentry: a guidebook for community-based organizations (2010), available at https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/29146/412211-partnering-with-jails-to-improve-reentry-a-guidebook-for-community-based-organizations.pdf ., 60. petersilia, supra note 38, at 4–5 (citing seiter & kadela), supra note 50, at 368; see also chuck colson, thirty-sixth annual review of criminal procedure — justice that restores: a paradigm-shift in criminal justice practices , 36 geo. l.j. ann. rev. crim. proc., at iii (2007)., 61. mirlinda ndrecka, the impact of reentry programs on recidivism: a meta-analysis (2014), (unpublished ph.d. dissertation, university of cincinnati) at iii., 62. a.b.a., supra note 41, at 15., 63. robert martinson, what works questions and answers about prison reform , 35 pub. int. 22 (1974)., 64. christopher t. lowenkamp et al., when a person isn’t a data point: making evidence – based practice work , 6 fed. prob. 11, 12–15 (dec. 2012)., 67. see, e.g. , or. rev. stat. § 182.525, 2003; ark. code § 16-93-104; s. c. code ann. § 24-21-10; ky. rev. stat. ann. § 532.007; 730 ill. comp. stat. ann. § 190/10; and tex. bus. & com. code ann. § 501.092., 68. see lowenkamp, et al., supra note 64, at 12–15., 69. for an in-depth discussion of the merits and pitfalls of ebp, see laura k. abel, evidence-based access to justice , 13 u. pa. j.l. & soc. change 295 (2009); douglas b. marlowe, evidence-based policies and practices for drug-involved offenders , 91 prison j. 27s (2011); gerald p. lopez, how mainstream reformers design ambitious reentry programs doomed to fail and destined to reinforce targeted mass incarceration and social control , 11 hastings race & poverty l.j. 1 (2014)., 70.  see gottschall & armour, supra note 32, at 53–55; see also douglas b. marlowe, et al., matching judicial supervision to clients’ risk status in drug court , 52 crime & delinq. 52, 54 (2006)., 71. weisberg, supra note 51 at 799–800., 72. kristin brown parker, the missing pieces in federal reentry courts: a model for success , 8 drexel l. rev. 397 (2016). available at http://drexel.edu/law/lawreview/issues/archives/v8-2/brown/ ., 73. eric j. miller, the therapeutic effects of managerial reentry courts , 20 fed. sent’g rep., 127, 127 (2007)., also in this edition.

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About Marvin L. Astrada

Marvin L. Astrada holds master’s and doctoral degrees in politics and international relations from Florida International University (FIU) and a J.D. from Rutgers University. He teaches in the Politics & History Department at New York University in Washington, D.C. He has served as a research scientist with the Applied Research Center at FIU.

Reentry Analysis and Risk Assessment for End-of-Life Disposal of a Multi-layer LEO Satellite

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• Volume 19 , pages 496–508, ( 2018 )

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As the tasks of satellites become more complicated, the satellites become bigger, and various kinds of mission payloads are loaded inside them. To analyze the disposal of low Earth orbit satellites at the end of their useful life, a reentry analysis method that includes objects with several layers is proposed in this paper. For precise analysis, an object analysis list is used to simulate the process sequence between parent and child object when break-up occurs, and an information inheritance method on random transverse velocity generation is proposed. In consideration of the proposed method, reentry survivability analysis was performed, and the results were compared with the debris risk assessment and mitigation analysis reentry analysis program of the European Space Agency.

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This research was supported as part of the results of the Space Technology Development Program from the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2013M1A3A3A02042540).

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• \(\rho \) density ( \({kg}/{m}^{3})\) , \(C_\mathrm{p}\) mean-specific heat capacity (J/kg K), \(T_\mathrm{m}\) melting temperature (K), \(q_\mathrm{m} \) specific heat of melting (J/kg), \(\varepsilon \) mean emission coefficient , K thermal conductivity (W/mK)

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Min, Co., Lee, Dw. Reentry Analysis and Risk Assessment for End-of-Life Disposal of a Multi-layer LEO Satellite. Int. J. Aeronaut. Space Sci. 19 , 496–508 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42405-018-0036-0

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Essay on Reentry

By reginald dwayne betts, read by tracy k. smith.

At two a.m., without enough spirits spilling into my liver to know to keep my mouth shut, my youngest learned of years I spent inside a box

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Systematic review of qualitative evaluations of reentry programs addressing problematic drug use and mental health disorders amongst people transitioning from prison to communities

• Sacha Kendall 1 ,
• Sarah Redshaw 1 ,
• Stephen Ward 2 ,
• Sarah Wayland 1 &
• Elizabeth Sullivan 1  

Health & Justice volume  6 , Article number:  4 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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The paper presents a systematic review and metasynthesis of findings from qualitative evaluations of community reentry programs. The programs sought to engage recently released adult prison inmates with either problematic drug use or a mental health disorder.

Seven biomedical and social science databases, Cinahl, Pubmed, Scopus, Proquest, Medline, Sociological abstracts and Web of Science and publisher database Taylor and Francis were searched in 2016 resulting in 2373 potential papers. Abstract reviews left 140 papers of which 8 were included after detailed review. Major themes and subthemes were identified through grounded theory inductive analysis of results from the eight papers. Of the final eight papers the majority (6) were from the United States. In total, the papers covered 405 interviews and included 121 (30%) females and 284 (70%) males.

Findings suggest that the interpersonal skills of case workers; access to social support and housing; and continuity of case worker relationships throughout the pre-release and post-release period are key social and structural factors in program success.

Evaluation of community reentry programs requires qualitative data to contextualize statistical findings and identify social and structural factors that impact on reducing incarceration and improving participant health. These aspects of program efficacy have implications for reentry program development and staff training and broader social and health policy and services.

Effective community reentry programs are one component in strategies to reduce recidivism and assist in the successful transition of prison inmates to community. The rising rate of adult incarceration is a major public health and societal problem worldwide. Globally, there are an estimated 10.35 million people in custody (Walmsley 2015 ). Prison inmates are a vulnerable population characterised by complex health problems. People who have experienced imprisonment have higher rates of mental illness, infectious diseases, chronic diseases and mortality in comparison to the general population (Bradshaw et al. 2017 ; Fazel and Baillargeon 2011 ). Problematic drug use is pervasive, affecting approximately one third of male prison inmates and half of female prison inmates (Fazel et al. 2017 ). Inadequately treated mental health problems and substance use is associated with re-incarceration (Kinner and Wang 2014 ).

Reentry to the community is known to be highly stressful. This is attributable to the complexity of health problems and poor engagement with health and social services (Fazel and Baillargeon 2011 ; Fazel et al. 2006 ; Kinner et al. 2011 ; Kinner 2006 ). A recent systematic review of randomized controlled trials of community reentry interventions designed to improve prisoner health from imprisonment to 1 year post release concluded ‘the high burden of mortality, morbidity, and hospitalization post-release suggested that a greater focus on improving health in this population during and after release is warranted’ (Kouyoumdjian et al. 2015 p.e29) and that there are substantial gaps in evidence (also see Hayhurst et al. 2015 ).

We aim to identify and synthesise the factors relevant to successful community reentry identified by qualitative reentry program evaluations. A systematic review of the literature was conducted to synthesise current evidence in this area with a focus on reentry programs targeting mental health disorders and problematic drug use. People with mental health disorders and problematic drug use are over-represented in the prison system. This is in part due to a lack of community support services for these populations coupled with harsh legislation targeting particular behaviours (Brinkley-Rubinstein 2013 ).

The post-release period is a high-risk period characterised by poor continuity of care, inadequate social support and limited financial resources resulting in poorer health outcomes and a return to crime related activities (Binswanger et al. 2012 ). Prison inmates with a history of drug dependence are particularly vulnerable, with higher rates of morbidity, mortality and return to custody in the 6-month post-release period (McMillan et al. 2008 ) and a heightened risk for mortality in the first week post-release (Bukten et al. 2017 ). Prison inmates with a history of mental health disorder experience worse outcomes on release from prison including substance use, poor mental health, and criminal activity (Cutcher et al. 2014 ). Diagnosis of a major psychiatric disorder can be predictive of recidivism and associated with shorter time to re-incarceration (Fu et al. 2013 ). People with a dual diagnosis of mental health disorder and substance use have a risk of re-incarceration more than 40% higher than individuals with no diagnosis (Blank et al. 2014 ).

Recent research examining the causal relationship between problematic drug use and re-arrest shows a complex longitudinal association between these factors and identifies social factors such as access to support and services as significantly impacting these behaviours in the reentry population (Link and Hamilton 2017 ). This new evidence highlights the critical importance of access to effective reentry programs and social support for people exiting prison. Moreover, it indicates the relevance of qualitative program evaluation to understand the nuances of program efficacy and the particular quality and type of social components that program participants find beneficial.

Community reentry programs for people exiting prison are typically evaluated applying quantitative methods. Quantitative evaluation is necessary for examining program outcomes, however, when a program aims to improve the health of participants or prevent re-incarceration, quantitative methods are limited. Health is comprised not only of physical components that lend themselves to objective measurement but also subjective and relational dimensions that are embedded in participant experience. Similarly, the structural factors that impact on incarceration are more complex than statistical crime data can reveal (de Viggiani 2007 ). In contrast, qualitative evaluations of reentry programs reveal the experiential elements of program success and the social and structural aspects of reentry programs that impact positively on participant health and reducing incarceration. They allow for the exploration of the ‘why’ in program efficacy.

Detailed information gathered in qualitative evaluations can contribute to the demonstration of implementation intensity and program fidelity by connecting treatment subjects’ experiences with assessment of program elements (Miller et al. 2012 ; Miller 2014 ; Neale et al. 2005 ; Thomas and Harden 2008 ). Qualitative evaluations contextualize quantitative findings to effectively interpret a program’s holistic value and provide insight into source effects such as gender, ethnicity, education and other structural factors (CRD 2008 ). Synthesising qualitative research has similarly become important. Meta-synthesis seeks to explain and understand phenomena by pulling together findings from qualitative research (Stone and Seaman 2014 ) into a new integrative interpretation (Finfgeld 2003 ).

Sample and procedures

The aim of this review is to provide a synthesis of the factors relevant to successful community reentry identified by qualitative reentry program evaluations. The scope of the review was papers describing qualitative evaluations of reentry programs for people transitioning from prison to communities targeting substance use and mental health disorders.

A search of databases for published papers containing qualitative evaluations of reentry health programs was completed using the PRISMA statement in October 2016 with a cut-off date of 2006. The cut-off date was chosen as there were few published findings for such programs before this date. This was in part due to the fact that reentry programs are relatively new and also to the lack of evaluation of such programs (Lattimore and Visher 2013 ). The review was restricted to studies relating to adult prison inmates over 18 years of age.

The search included databases Cinahl, Pubmed, Scopus, Proquest, Medline, Sociological abstracts and Web of Science and publisher database Taylor and Francis. Search terms included ‘pre-release’, ‘transitional’, ‘reintegration’, ‘throughcare’ and ‘reentry program and prison’, ‘interview’ and ‘qualitative study’. Figure  1 details the search strategy in PRISMA format.

PRISMA flow diagram

The search resulted in 2373 papers including duplicates. The most productive databases were Scopus, Proquest and Taylor and Francis, which yielded 2025 between them. Abstract reviews resulted in the selection of 140 papers. Of these, 66 appeared to relate prison inmates’ experiences of reentry programs. An iterative process then followed in which these papers were reviewed by the team of three researchers using a summary spreadsheet which included publication details, the focus of the paper and the abstract. Those relating primarily to substance use and mental health disorder were selected for review. This excluded papers focusing specifically on employment ( n  = 3), housing ( n  = 1) and college programs ( n  = 2) or specifically addressing a health condition, i.e. HIV ( n  = 1). The review then excluded those that were not qualitative ( n  = 2), not evaluating a program ( n  = 17), not concerned with prison inmates ( n  = 5) did not extend to community post-release ( n  = 12 focused on in-prison programs only), or were concerned with a specific group such as young or long term prison inmates (and did not meet the reentry health program criteria) ( n  = 16). See PRISMA diagram for reasons for exclusion and Table  1 for the final eight papers selected with characteristics of the studies involved.

Following the most recent and well-cited protocol for qualitative reviews developed by Walsh and Downe ( 2006 ) all papers were reviewed by three team members for rationale, recruitment, methods of analysis and findings. The review included assessing the validity of results and for rigour across the rationale, methodology, findings and limitations. The final papers were examined in detail taking a grounded theory approach (Charmaz 2006 ) allowing for inductive analysis. Major themes and subthemes were identified through analysis of results from all papers. These themes were recorded in a table indicating the papers related to each theme. Detail from each paper relating to the themes identified were collected and summarised for each theme.

As in Thomas and Harden ( 2008 ), “going beyond” the content of the original studies was achieved by using the descriptive themes identified in inductive analysis of study findings. Barriers and facilitators inferred from the views participants expressed about reentry program experiences were captured in the descriptive themes and the implications of these views for reentry program development were then considered.

Of the final eight papers selected the majority (6) were from the United States, one was from the United Kingdom, and one was from New Zealand. In six studies it was stated that interviews were semi-structured, in one interviews were structured though there was opportunity for individual program participants to expand upon information gathered through the questionnaire by giving personal, narrative accounts, and one study used focus groups only. The number of interview or focus group participants ranged from 10 to 226. In total, the papers covered 405 interviews (including 24 in focus groups). Three papers focused on female participants only, four included males only and one included both. A total of 121 (30%) female and 284 (70%) male participants were included in the studies. Ages were provided as a range or as an average with a minimum 19 years and a maximum 56 years. One paper did not include information on age or ethnicity/race and three papers provided an age range but not ethnicity/race. In all studies participants were invited to be part of the research and voluntarily attended the program being evaluated. In three studies a carefully matched control group of those who chose not to or were unable to participate in the program due to their imminent release was used (Miller et al. 2016 ; Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ; Zortman et al. 2016 ). In one study, participants were initially randomly assigned by selecting every fourth name on a list of program participants over a five year period (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ).

The overarching conclusion from all papers reviewed was that participants in reentry programs benefit from a combination of practical resources and empathic support spanning from pre-release to varying lengths of time in the post-release period. Three major themes were identified across all papers: 1) structural context; 2) supportive relationships and 3) continuity of care including pre-release planning. The themes shown in Table  2 while distinct have some overlap and interconnection. The following discussion presents a metasynthesis of findings from the papers analysed following identification of common themes.

Structural context

The importance of structural context was identified in all of the papers reviewed. The structural context, identified as the systems that govern an individual’s engagement with, or access to services includes aspects of the social system impacting on the individual’s health and wellbeing and capacity to avoid re-arrest. In the studies reviewed, structural context translated into specific forms of practical support provided via the program or relational and psychological factors associated with service provision.

Housing and employment were identified in all studies as the most critical forms of practical support or ‘recovery capital’ (Elison et al. 2016 ) in terms of desistance from problematic drug use and avoiding reincarceration (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ; Hunter et al. 2016 ). This was acknowledged in programs either through the direct provision of housing as in the Solid Start Program evaluated by Pleggenkuhle et al. ( 2016 ) or via the role of program case workers who were assigned to assist participants in accessing housing or employment by linking them in to other services (Angell et al. 2014 ; Gilbert and Elley 2015 ). In one study, housing was identified as the primary social factor impacting on reentry success and precursor for all other forms of social capital that might promote participant health and avoidance of re-arrest such as education, employment and pro-social relationships (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ). In Zortman et al. ( 2016 ), progression through the reentry program was contingent on finding employment whilst obtainment of housing and increasing independence were seen as markers of reentry success. The Fresh Start program evaluated by Hunter et al. ( 2016 ) focused on building employment readiness, job seeking and retention in addition to coordination of housing and other community services. In Angell et al. ( 2014 ), case managers focused on assisting inmates with mental illness in building community connections with mental health services, housing/landlords and social networks in order to establish long term sources of support.

A significant issue for individuals exiting the prison system is how to overcome the structural deficits of stigma and discrimination associated with incarceration. Lack of credit history, finances, references from landlords and employment presented major barriers to participants securing housing post-release (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ). A number of the studies highlighted the important role of caseworkers in assisting participants to overcome these structural barriers via advocacy and access to their knowledge and connections with services (i.e ‘social capital’) (Angell et al. 2014 , p496; Gilbert and Elley 2015 ). Assisting program participants with accessing housing and other resources was also identified as an important way in which caseworkers bonded and established trust with participants (Angell et al. 2014 ; Hunter et al. 2016 ; Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ), which in turn promoted personal agency and attitude change in participants (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ). These factors are identified as relevant to both positive reentry experience and success in the short term but also capacity to reintegrate into the community in the longer term through access to resources and sustainable social support (Elison et al. 2016 ; Gilbert and Elley 2015 ).

The combination of both resources and empathic support provided by caseworkers produced positive relational and psychological outcomes for participants in the short and long term including reconnection with family (Hunter et al., 2016 ), improved interpersonal relationships (Zortman et al. 2016 ) improved self-efficacy (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ) and formation of pro-social identity (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ). Pleggenkuhle et al. ( 2016 ) note that stable housing was associated with increased personal agency, optimism, goal-setting, success and responsibility. Participants experienced changes in attitude and thinking and were more likely than the comparison sample to describe future plans such as specific career paths or more definite educational or vocational plans and to demonstrate attitudinal changes (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 , p.390). The Pathway program evaluated by Gilbert and Elley ( 2015 ) included community volunteering to reintegrate participants in their local communities and link them to pro-social activities. Participants reported that this experience promoted positive psychological changes that were protective against recidivism including development of a pro-social identity through the overcoming of negative stereotypes, contribution to the community, responsibility and new pro-social relationships.

In all studies, participants reported the benefit of case managers working to understand and meet their individual needs. This was attributed to the action taken by case managers but also the disposition and commitment of case managers to provide clients with help and support. Case managers’ efforts to tailor support to their individual clients was highly valued by participants and central to program efficacy in terms of addressing the causes of ongoing offending (Gilbert and Elley 2015 , p 20). Participants reported that program responsiveness to individualised needs and goals resulted in connection to relevant resources and improved their chances of reentry success (Hunter et al., 2016 ). The characteristics of supportive relationships reported by program participants are outlined in detail in the next section.

Supportive relationships

The interpersonal skills of program case managers were identified as central to program efficacy. Characteristics such as empathy, honesty, non-judgmentalism, perseverance, reliability, care and commitment were repeatedly cited by participants as factors that contributed to their success in the program and reentry experience. Participants spoke of case managers as highly supportive (Gilbert and Elley 2015 , p25-26) and going ‘above and beyond’ for them (Angell et al. 2014 , p494). In Johnson et al. ( 2015 ) counsellors were recognised as a dependable support person during the reentry period when participants were feeling anxious, lonely or stressed (p344).

These characteristics engendered particular qualities in the client relationship. Participants described relationships with case managers built on trust, openness, respectful communication, solidarity and support. Trust was especially important for participants with serious mental illness because of participants’ past interactions with authorities, which were often coercive in nature (Angell et al. 2014 , p493). In addition, case managers were valued for being knowledgeable, non-authoritative, hopeful, persistent and available in a crisis. Participants reported how beneficial it was for them to have someone who didn’t give up on them (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ), someone who was there when they needed them (Johnson et al. 2015 ) and someone who had the knowledge and persistence to advocate on their behalf and assist them in overcoming structural barriers to reintegration (Angell et al. 2014 ; Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ).

Where bonding was established with the case manager, participants were motivated to succeed in the program and described the relationship as fostering their responsibility and independence (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ; Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ; Zortman et al. 2016 ). Participants had a vested interest in the program because of the alliance and ongoing relationship they had with program staff (Johnson et al. 2015 ). Effective engagement with clients through positive communication and practical assistance promoted investment in the shared tasks of treatment and enabled staff to provide client-centred care (Angell et al. 2014 ). In some instances the support of caseworkers was directly credited for keeping the participant out of prison (Gilbert and Elley 2015 , p23).

The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of programs are also relevant, as these influenced the nature of the client relationship and program focus. For example, in Angell et al. 2014 , acknowledgement that prison inmates with serious mental illness are most likely to prioritise reconnection with informal networks on release from prison meant that case managers coordinated their efforts with clients’ primary network members (Angell et al. 2014 , p 495). Similarly, clients in the Fresh Start Prisoner Reentry Program noted that case manager contact with family members helped to solidify reentry plans (Hunter et al. 2016 , p1306). The online model of transitional care evaluated by Elison et al. ( 2016 ) focused on developing the recovery capital of inmates by building individual coping skills. Participants in this program reported benefit from developing these skills but also significant anxiety about desistance from problematic drug use and crime in the post-release period without therapeutic and practical support.

The programs evaluated by Gilbert and Elley ( 2015 ) and Hunter et al. ( 2016 ) were both underpinned by the ‘Good Lives Model’, which focuses on meeting individual needs and promoting long term reintegration via a strengths-based approach. This model is built on the premise that ‘risk can be managed by promoting knowledge, strengths, skills and access to internal and external resources’ (Hunter et al. 2016 , p1301). In both these studies clients reported the benefit of ongoing support from supportive case managers who worked with them to meet their individual needs and goals. This included access to resources and connection to social networks and community activities that were protective against re-offending.

The importance of pro-social relationships was noted in several studies. Gilbert and Elley ( 2015 ) highlight the benefit of peer and mentor relationships in terms of building pro-social identity and support networks. Zortman et al. ( 2016 ) identify prosocial support networks as reinforcing pro-social behaviour and an essential element in the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders with a history of problematic drug use. Pleggenkuhle et al. ( 2016 ) note the motivational and therapeutic benefits of sharing experiences with peers facing similar challenges (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 , p389). In recognition that women needed assistance to initiate contact with positive sober people in the community, the Sober Network Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) program included interventions to build communication skills and connect participants with a sober support network (Johnson et al. 2015 , p336).

The papers evaluating female programs (Johnson et al. 2015 and Miller et al. 2016 ) identified particular social factors impacting on program efficacy. These factors were relational. Miller et al. ( 2016 ) found that women’s pathways to problematic drug use and crime are strongly associated with romantic partner relationships. Women also reported pathways to addiction and offending resulting from childhood trauma. These factors are relevant to program efficacy because even when women were engaged in the program and held positive views about rehabilitation, women experienced significant self doubt about their capacity to stay sober during the post-release period (p132). Women also reported significant dissatisfaction with perceived gender inequities related to treatment and health care in prison (p133). Significantly, these findings were not revealed by the quantitative component of the program evaluation, highlighting the importance of qualitative program review. Miller et al. ( 2016 ) conclude that reentry programs need to be developed including clearly definable female-specific components such as trauma-informed care and based on further understanding about choices related to social networks and relationships (p134).

Johnson et al. ( 2015 ) similarly argue that an interpersonal approach to Substance Use Disorders (SUD) and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is imperative to meeting the needs of incarcerated women because interpersonal difficulties not only affect MDD but are also predictors of SUD relapse and recidivism in women (p331). This program was a relationship-based intervention including ongoing therapeutic support from a prison counsellor and assistance with building a supportive peer network. Participants in the study reported that access to a structured program post-release was beneficial because of their lack of prosocial relationships with people who are sober (p344). The therapeutic relationship was especially important to staying sober because women highly valued the continuity of care from a familiar and trusted professional. Counsellors could effectively engage women in prison and post-release, even in instances of relapse (p345).

Continuity of care from the same worker made a significant difference to the women in the Johnson et al. ( 2015 ) study, however, continuity of care was a primary theme identified across all papers. The following section will outline this in further detail.

Continuity of care

Continuity of care is essential to building ‘recovery capital’ that extends beyond short term reentry to long term reintegration (Elison et al. 2016 ). As outlined above, ‘recovery capital’ took various forms in the studies reviewed including resources such as housing and employment; pro-social relationships; pro-social identity; coping skills; and community engagement. Continuity of care provided by professional staff allowed for attention to individual needs and the formation and maintenance of a therapeutic relationship (Hunter et al. 2016 ; Zortman et al. 2016 ). In Hunter et al. 2016 , program services were even added over time in response to participants’ stated risks, needs, strengths and goals (p1308). Participants identified this responsiveness as a key strength of the program. In Zortman et al. ( 2016 ) participants cited the continuity of care from case managers as an important component in their progression through the program, sustained success and relapse prevention. Through continuous support, participants were able to develop insight into their problems and build skills and resources to prevent substance use relapse (Zortman et al. 2016 ). Johnson et al. ( 2015 ) also report a significant decrease in depressive symptoms and substance use amongst program participants from baseline to 3 months post-release, attributed to the continuous support provided by counsellors.

Other participants reported that through ongoing case manager support and resources they were able to change their lives and experienced increased independence and responsibility over time as a result of these supports (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ). In some studies this was enhanced by supportive peer and family relationships (Angell et al. 2014 ; Gilbert and Elley 2015 ; Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 ; Zortman et al. 2016 ). Indeed, due to the limited resources in some studies, there was a focus on reconnecting participants with family or new social supports in order to build sustainable recovery capital (Angell et al. 2014 ).

Pre-release support was identified as critical to success in the post-release period in terms of initial identification of needs and goals and building rapport with case managers (Angell et al. 2014 ; Hunter et al. 2016 ; Miller 2014 ). Pre-release planning was administered in differing ways across the programs. Elison et al. ( 2016 ) found potential for an online program to support the process of recovery from substance use in prison and provide continuity of care in the reentry process. Elison et al. ( 2016 ) identify graded transition from prison to community with enhanced opportunities for intervention and rehabilitation as possible contributors to ‘increased effectiveness and sustained therapeutic benefits’ of the program (p.177). Another program, Sober Network Interpersonal Psychotherapy, ‘provides contact with the same prison-based counsellor from within prison through the first 3 months after release to stabilize women until they can get established with community treatment providers’ (Johnson et al. 2015 , p332). Johnson et al. ( 2015 ) give accounts of pre-release program processes such as establishing positive social connections by reaching out to sober people while still incarcerated.

The Solid Start housing provision and social support program included pre-release planning which enabled physical separation from prior residence and opportunity for change, case management and coordination of services according to individual need (Pleggenkuhle et al. 2016 , p.383). The Fresh Start program evaluated by Hunter et al. ( 2016 ) included case managers working with their clients to complete a ‘ReEntry Plan’ reflecting the clients’ strengths, goals, and identified needs so that each participant had a treatment plan before exiting the correctional facility. Case managers in the Fresh Start program ‘served as a natural bridge for individuals transitioning from prison to … community’ and sought to (a) enhance motivation and engagement; (b) establish clear collaboration between the criminal justice system, treatment providers, and community supports; (c) establish continuity of care; and (d) provide pre- and post-release supports (p.1303).

Program staff in the study of Miller et al. ( 2016 ) also assisted program participants through individualized ‘Reentry Accountability Plans’ including coordination of mental health, medical, and drug treatment and linking to community resources prior to release’ (p.131). In the Pathway Program, individual needs are assessed in a 2-month ‘phasing in’ pre-release process reported by participants as important to preparing for release and decreasing the stressors associated with reentry (Gilbert and Elley 2015 , p.24). Participants reported finding value in different service elements, reflecting the individualised nature of the client plans (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ).

Program participants recognise the need for ongoing support and in some instances, the opportunity for continuity of care was the primary motivator for program participation (Hunter et al. 2016 ; Johnson et al. 2015 ). Participant motivation is an important factor in program efficacy, as Pleggenkuhle et al. ( 2016 ) demonstrate that the facilitation of positive and practical attitudes can be an important mechanism of desistance (p393). Overall, participants across all studies reported that continuity of care offered the tools to become independent. This was not only about accessing housing and other structural resources but the psychological shifts that come through ongoing support and building of recovery capital.

Limitations of the studies

There are common limitations across all of the studies reviewed. These are typical of qualitative research and include: 1) Small sample sizes; 2) Unable to establish causality because the focus was on eliciting participant experiences; and 3) Non-generalizability of findings. Non-generalizability of findings is relevant in that most of the studies are from the United States and results may not translate elsewhere due to differences in prison systems but also applies at the program level, i.e. the experiences of one set of participants cannot be generalised to other potential program users.

Selection bias is also a limitation across many of the studies. For example, Pleggenkuhle et al. ( 2016 ) note that participants in their study may have been more motivated than other inmates. Hunter et al. ( 2016 ) recognise that their study lacked a comparison group and Miller et al. ( 2016 ) identify that their control group was not randomized. There is a need for more longitudinal data (Elison et al. 2016 ; Gilbert and Elley 2015 ; Hunter et al., 2016 ) and more data on female reentry experience (Angell et al. 2014 ). Gender issues related to program content were raised in only two of the papers reviewed (Johnson et al. 2015 and Miller et al. 2016 ). Moreover, the findings of Johnson et al.’s ( 2015 ) study are limited, as they were unable to establish causality because participants were also engaged with mental health and substance use disorder treatment services. Zortman et al. ( 2016 ) identify that there are limitations to the validity of their data because participant responses were self-reported and there was a lack of standardization across their research sites.

Description of method of analysis varied between papers and in one case was absent (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ). It was evident nevertheless that in all cases a variation of thematic analysis was used, which is arguably the most common method of initial analysis in qualitative research (Braun and Clarke 2006 ). Some papers then applied a theoretical approach to the discussion of the analysis such as an interpretative phenomenology (Elison et al. 2016 ) or a strengths based approach (Hunter et al. 2016 ). Greater uniformity in qualitative evaluation methods is desirable in bringing together results from similar studies.

Limitations of the review

There is limited qualitative program evaluation research available and standardization of qualitative evaluation and inclusion is a work in progress. There were some differences in programs that have not been examined in detail in our analysis though we did find similar elements in the program evaluations included. Data analysis methods applied in the qualitative evaluations reviewed were forms of thematic or grounded theory analysis. Our systematic review analysis has treated all methods similarly and focused on reported results. More consistency is needed in qualitative methods used in evaluation studies to enable comparisons and review of the literature.

This is the first systematic review of qualitative evaluations of reentry programs. Findings suggest that access to social support, housing and employment; the interpersonal skills of case workers; personalized approaches to case management; and continuity of care throughout the pre-release and post-release period are the key social and structural factors in program success. These factors impact on other measures of program efficacy such as reduced substance use and protecting against re-incarceration. The role of caseworkers as an advocate and advisor for program participants plays an important role in program success, as respectful communication combined with practical support was identified as beneficial in all papers. For women, the relational aspects of caseworker support such as trust and rapport are critical to program participation and relapse prevention. Continuity of individualised care goes some way to addressing the risk factors associated with reentry by assisting clients in establishing ‘recovery capital’. This includes accessing and maintaining housing and employment and providing an ongoing therapeutic relationship and connection to pro-social relationships. Where sustainable recovery is achieved, this can be transformative, resulting in reintegration into the community, long term desistance from substance use and crime and improved psychological health (Gilbert and Elley 2015 ).

Implications for public policy

The review indicates that comprehensive reentry programs that address the full range of social and structural issues via individualised support from case managers can be effective. Participants report benefit from reentry programs where a combination of practical resources and empathic support is provided spanning from the pre-release to the post-release period. The need for integrated, rather than crisis-driven support, and gender specific health and social support services to support reentry is also indicated.

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The research was funded with a Health Futures Development Grant from the University of Technology Sydney.

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Sacha Kendall, Sarah Redshaw, Sarah Wayland & Elizabeth Sullivan

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Contributions

SK, ES and SWard conceived and supervised the review. SR undertook searches. ES, SK, SR reviewed search results. ES, SK, SR and SWayland conducted final review analyses. SR, SK, ES led the writing. SWard and SWayland contributed to revision of manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Kendall, S., Redshaw, S., Ward, S. et al. Systematic review of qualitative evaluations of reentry programs addressing problematic drug use and mental health disorders amongst people transitioning from prison to communities. Health Justice 6 , 4 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40352-018-0063-8

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Reentry Correctional Programs: Analysis and Comparison Presentation

Introduction.

• Enhanced Thinking Skills (ETS) from England and Choosing to Think, Thinking to Choose (CTTC) from Philadelphia, PA.
• Overview and Sociocultural Perspectives.
• Effectiveness.
• Comparisons/Suggestions for Improvement.

This presentation is dedicated to the analysis and comparison of two reentry programs: the Enhanced Thinking Skills (ETS) curriculum that is used in England, UK and Choosing to Think, Thinking to Choose (CTTC), which is employed in Philadelphia, PA. The presentation will offer their overview, demonstrate the data which evidences their effectiveness, and suggest a comparison with some notes about potential improvements.

ETS: Overview, Sociocultural Perspectives

Travers, Wakeling, Mann, and Hollin (2013); National Institute of Justice (2017):

• Cognitive–behavioral skills; 20 2-hour sessions.
• Population: medium/high-risk offenders, 18+, male and female, any ethnicity.
• The importance of cognitive-behavioral skills for reentry; the issues that can lead to their deficiency.
• No cultural customization.

As described by Travers et al. (2013) and the National Institute of Justice (2017), ETS is a program that aims to develop cognitive-behavioral skills in medium-to-high-risk adult offenders of any gender and ethnicity. To this end, ETS uses a series of 2-hour sessions delivered by the prison staff. The program is based on the idea that cognitive-behavioral skills are necessary for reentry and acknowledges the fact that a variety of socioeconomic and sociocultural factors can hinder their development. However, the program does not appear to have any specific cultural dimensions, which can be viewed as a limitation.

CTTC: Overview, Sociocultural Perspectives

Barnes, Hyatt, and Sherman (2016); National Institute of Justice (2018a):

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy; 14 2-hour sessions.
• Population: high-risk, male,18+, Black and other.
• Takes into account the importance of social skills for reentry.
• Customized for Black males.

According to Barnes et al. (2016) and the National Institute of Justice (2018a), CTTC is based on cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and includes 14 two-hour-long sessions that are delivered by prison staff to high-risk male adult prisoners. The program is mostly focused on Black people, but other races and ethnicities are also eligible. From the sociocultural perspective, the program is somewhat geared towards a specific ethnicity, which implies a form of cultural customization. However, the found materials on CTTC do not focus on the way this customization is achieved. Also, the program recognizes the significance of social skills for reentry and, as a result, focuses on them.

ETS Effectiveness

The National Institute of Justice (2017) notes that there are at least three relevant studies which investigate ETS and its effectiveness. It should be noted that there is a randomized controlled trial which is dated 2003. It demonstrated the effectiveness of ETS in reducing reconviction rates. However, the source is very outdated, which is why it is not present here. Newer ones will be discussed. Fig. 1 demonstrates that the report commissioned by the British Ministry of Justice found a statistically significant reduction of reconviction rates in the treatment group of ETS. However, the author notes that without the people who dropped out of the program, the reduction is slightly smaller and may lose statistical significance (Sadlier, 2010).

For reoffending, the picture is the same as can be seen in fig. 2: the frequency of reoffending was reduced in the treatment group (Sadlier, 2010). However, this figure does not depend on the drop-out rate. It should be noted that the report focused on 257 participants who took part in ETS; the control sample was thoroughly matched. Overall, the methodology of the report seems to make its results reliable, but it tracked the participants for one year only.

A more recent study by Travers et al. (2013) was focused on a larger sample (17,047 participants in the treatment group) for two years, but it also studied an earlier period (between 2000 and 2005). Additionally, it compared the treatment group to an automatically generated sample of 19,792 people. Only males were eligible for the study, and it was found that ETS resulted in a significant reduction in reoffending, especially when longer sentences were concerned. Thus, two recent studies on ETS suggest that it is effective. See fig. 3 for illustration.

Alternative to ETS?

• New approach to ETS: Thinking Skills Programme (TSP).
• TSP shown to be more effective (psychometric assessments).
• But: very small sample; issues with statistical significance.
• Conclusion: more research needed.

A recent study by Gobbett and Sellen (2013) also compared ETS to its more modern version, which is termed the Thinking Skills Programme (TSP). Gobbett and Sellen (2013) show that the latter may be more effective since it has higher scores for all the measures that the authors employed, including, for example, impulsivity, entitlement, and so on. The authors chose not to consider reconviction data.

It can be suggested that the approach of Gobbett and Sellen (2013) has merit: it is important to consider the impact that a cognitive-behavioral program has on the participants’ thinking. However, the authors used a very small sample and made conclusions based on the differences in scores (not its statistical significance). Thus, more research in this regard is required.

CTTC Effectiveness

There is less data on CTTS; the National Institute of Justice (2018a) identifies only one recent study that is worth noting. Barnes et al. (2016) examine the reoffending in 1,289 people, 457 of which were randomly placed in the intervention group. The sample was large, but the study followed the participants for only one year. The results indicated a statistically significant reduction in the prevalence of reoffending when all offenses were considered at once. However, the authors also presented the information for different types of offenses, in which case the significance was not present for any of them. No statistically significant effect on the frequency of reoffending was found (see fig. 4). It should be noted that the ETS studies did not consider various types of offenses individually. However, the changes in the frequency of reoffending for CTTC were not statistically significant, and, as a result, the National Institute of Justice (2018a) deemed CTTC not effective.

Comparison and Suggestions for Improvement

• Two similar programs; ETS => 3 supportive studies, and CTTC => one disproving study.
• Conclusion: ETS more effective than CTTC (National Institute of Justice, 2018b).

Potential improvements:

• CTTC: review of the methods.
• Both: delivery by professionals.

Thus, it is apparent that the two approaches would be expected to have different efficiency. ETS is supported by at least three studies. CTTC has only one randomized controlled trial dedicated to it, and the latter suggests that CTTC is not effective. The National Institute of Justice (2018b) indicates that the data from high-quality research can be used to define the effectiveness of a reentry program. Also, the programs are mostly similar: they use CBT-based methods to provide high-risk offenders with the skills required for reentry. Thus, it can be suggested that the programs can be compared, and the comparison would be in favor of ETS as shown by the presented statistical analyses of reoffending and reconviction.

However, as pointed out by Gobbett and Sellen (2013), reentry programs may benefit from some improvements. First, it is apparent that CTTC requires the revision of its content and methods since it is not effective in its current form. However, it is more important to note that, as it has been mentioned, both programs are delivered by prison staff. Barnes et al. (2016) demonstrate that the people who are assigned to this task typically lack relevant training. The possibility of delivering programs by professionals or training staff for this activity seems to be a feasible and important improvement strategy. Thus, the introduction of professional delivery is the one revision that should be suggested for both programs.

Conclusions

• Statistical analyses of outcomes: ETS more effective than CTTC?
• Only specific metrics (most often, reoffending).
• Few studies; some outdated.
• Potential improvements: professional delivery.

In summary, the ETS has been shown to be more effective than CTTC. This conclusion is based on the statistical analysis of the rates of reoffending and reconviction. However, it should be noted that both programs are understudied. They require more attention from researchers for conclusive statements to be made because the number of studies dedicated to them is small, and some of them are outdated. Additionally, the literature that does exist seems to focus on specific metrics, which illustrate the programs’ effectiveness but do not reflect it fully. For example, the investigation of the psychometric parameters can be considered. Finally, both ETS and CTTC can be improved through the introduction of professional delivery, which the key suggestion for their revision that can be proposed.

Barnes, G., Hyatt, J., & Sherman, L. (2016). Even a little bit helps. Criminal Justice And Behavior , 44 (4), 611-630. Web.

Gobbett, M., & Sellen, J. (2013). An evaluation of the HM Prison Service “Thinking Skills Programme” using psychometric assessments. International Journal Of Offender Therapy And Comparative Criminology , 58 (4), 454-473. Web.

National Institute of Justice. (2017). Program profile: Enhanced Thinking Skills (England) . Web.

National Institute of Justice. (2018a). Program profile: Choosing to Think, Thinking to Choose . Web.

National Institute of Justice. (2018b). Research on returning offender programs and promising practices . Web.

Sadlier, G. (2010). Evaluation of the impact of the HM Prison Service Enhanced Thinking Skills programme on reoffending outcomes of the surveying prisoner crime reduction (SPCR) sample . Web.

Travers, R., Wakeling, H. C., Mann, R. E., & Hollin, C. R. (2013). Reconviction following a cognitive skills intervention: An alternative quasi‐experimental methodology. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 18 (1), 48-65. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, June 14). Reentry Correctional Programs: Analysis and Comparison. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reentry-correctional-programs-analysis-and-comparison/

"Reentry Correctional Programs: Analysis and Comparison." IvyPanda , 14 June 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/reentry-correctional-programs-analysis-and-comparison/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Reentry Correctional Programs: Analysis and Comparison'. 14 June.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Reentry Correctional Programs: Analysis and Comparison." June 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reentry-correctional-programs-analysis-and-comparison/.

1. IvyPanda . "Reentry Correctional Programs: Analysis and Comparison." June 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reentry-correctional-programs-analysis-and-comparison/.

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306: Essay on Reentry

Essay on Reentry by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Read the automated transcript.

At two a.m., without enough spirits spilling into my liver to know to keep my mouth shut, my youngest learned of years I spent inside a box: a spell, a kind of incantation I was under; not whisky, but History: I robbed a man. This, months before he would drop bucket after bucket on opposing players, the entire bedraggled bunch five & six & he leaping as if every lay-up erases something. That’s how I saw it, my screaming-coaching-sweating presence recompense for the pen. My father has never seen me play ball is part of this. My oldest knew, told of my crimes by a stranger. Tell me we aren’t running towards failure is what I want to ask my sons, but it is two in the a.m. The oldest has gone off to dream in the comfort of his room, the youngest despite him seeming more lucid than me, just reflects cartoons back from his eyes. So when he tells me, Daddy it’s okay, I know what's happening is some straggling angel, lost from his pack finding a way to fulfill his duty, lending words to this kid who crawls into my arms, wanting, more than stories of my prison, the sleep that he fought while I held court at a bar with men who knew that when the drinking was done, the drinking wouldn’t make the stories we brought home any easier to tell.

"Essay on Reentry" by Reginald Dwayne Betts, from FELON by Reginald Dwayne Betts, copyright © 2019 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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New York Takes Crucial Step Toward Making Congestion Pricing a Reality

The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted to approve a new $15 toll to drive into Manhattan. The plan still faces challenges from six lawsuits before it can begin in June.

By Winnie Hu and Ana Ley

New York City completed a crucial final step on Wednesday in a decades-long effort to become the first American city to roll out a comprehensive congestion pricing program, one that aims to push motorists out of their cars and onto mass transit by charging new tolls to drive into Midtown and Lower Manhattan.

The program could start as early as mid-June after the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that will install and manage the program, voted 11-to-1 to approve the final tolling rates, which will charge most passenger cars $15 a day to enter at 60th Street and below in Manhattan. The program is expected to reduce traffic and raise $1 billion annually for public transit improvements.

It was a historic moment for New York’s leaders and transportation advocates after decades of failed attempts to advance congestion pricing even as other gridlocked cities around the world, including London, Stockholm and Singapore, proved that similar programs could reduce traffic and pollution.

While other American cities have introduced related concepts by establishing toll roads or closing streets to traffic, the plan in New York is unmatched in ambition and scale.

Congestion pricing is expected to reduce the number of vehicles that enter Lower Manhattan by about 17 percent, according to a November study by an advisory committee reporting to the M.T.A. The report also said that the total number of miles driven in 28 counties across the region would be reduced.

“This was the right thing to do,” Janno Lieber, the authority’s chairman and chief executive, said after the vote. “New York has more traffic than any place in the United States, and now we’re doing something about it.”

Congestion pricing has long been a hard sell in New York, where many people commute by car from the boroughs outside of Manhattan and the suburbs, in part because some of them do not have access to public transit.

New York State legislators finally approved congestion pricing in 2019 after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo helped push it through. A series of recent breakdowns in the city’s subway system had underscored the need for billions of dollars to update its aging infrastructure.

It has taken another five years to reach the starting line. Before the tolling program can begin, it must be reviewed by the Federal Highway Administration, which is expected to approve it.

Congestion pricing also faces legal challenges from six lawsuits that have been brought by elected officials and residents from across the New York region. Opponents have increasingly mobilized against the program in recent months, citing the cost of the tolls and the potential environmental effects from shifting traffic and pollution to other areas as drivers avoid the tolls.

A court hearing is scheduled for April 3 and 4 on a lawsuit brought by the State of New Jersey, which is seen as the most serious legal challenge. The mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., Mark J. Sokolich, has filed a related lawsuit.

Four more lawsuits have been brought in New York: by Ed Day, the Rockland County executive; by Vito Fossella, the Staten Island borough president, and the United Federation of Teachers; and by two separate groups of city residents.

Amid the litigation, M.T.A. officials have suspended some capital construction projects that were to be paid for by the program, and they said at a committee meeting on Monday that crucial work to modernize subway signals on the A and C lines had been delayed.

Nearly all the toll readers have been installed, and will automatically charge drivers for entering the designated congestion zone at 60th Street or below. There is no toll for leaving the zone or driving around in it. Through traffic on Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and the West Side Highway will not be tolled.

Under the final tolling structure, which was based on recommendations by the advisory panel, most passenger vehicles will be charged $15 a day from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, and from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends. The toll will be $24 for small trucks and charter buses, and will rise to $36 for large trucks and tour buses. It will be $7.50 for motorcycles.

Those tolls will be discounted by 75 percent at night, dropping the cost for a passenger vehicle to $3.75.

Fares will go up by $1.25 for taxis and black car services, and by $2.50 for Uber and Lyft. Passengers will be responsible for paying the new fees, and they will be added to every ride that begins, ends or occurs within the congestion zone. There will be no nighttime discounts. (The new fees come on top of an existing congestion surcharge that was imposed on for-hire vehicles in 2019.)

The tolls will mostly be collected using the E-ZPass system. Electronic detection points have been placed at entrances and exits to the tolling zone. Drivers who do not use an E-ZPass will pay significantly higher fees — for instance, $22.50 instead of $15 during peak hours for passenger vehicles.

Emergency vehicles like fire trucks, ambulances and police cars, as well as vehicles carrying people with disabilities, were exempted from the new tolls under the state’s congestion pricing legislation .

As for discounts, low-income drivers who make less than $50,000 annually can apply to receive half off the daytime toll after their first 10 trips in a calendar month. In addition, low-income residents of the congestion zone who make less than $60,000 a year can apply for a state tax credit.

All drivers entering the zone directly from four tolled tunnels — the Lincoln, Holland, Hugh L. Carey and Queens-Midtown — will receive a “crossing credit” that will be applied against the daytime toll. The credit will be $5 round-trip for passenger vehicles, $12 for small trucks and intercity and charter buses, $20 for large trucks and tour buses, and $2.50 for motorcycles. No credits will be offered at night.

Grace Ashford contributed reporting.

Winnie Hu is a Times reporter covering the people and neighborhoods of New York City. More about Winnie Hu

Ana Ley is a Times reporter covering New York City’s mass transit system and the millions of passengers who use it. More about Ana Ley

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The Anti-Abortion Endgame That Erin Hawley Admitted to the Supreme Court

Somewhat lost in the debate around abortion pills and oral arguments that took place at the Supreme Court in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine on Tuesday was one deeply uncomfortable truth: The very notion of what it means to practice emergency medicine is in dispute, with anti-abortion doctors insisting upon a right to refuse treatment for any patient who doesn’t meet their test of moral purity. Indeed, the right asserted is that in the absence of certainty about which patients are morally pure, the doctors want to deny medication to all patients, nationwide.

In public, the plaintiffs in this case—a group of doctors and dentists seeking to ban medication abortion—have long claimed they object to ending “unborn life” by finishing an “incomplete or failed” abortion at the hospital. But in court, they went much further. Their lawyer, Erin Hawley, admitted at oral argument that her clients don’t merely oppose terminating a pregnancy—they are pursuing the right to turn away a patient whose pregnancy has already been terminated . Indeed, they appear to want to deny even emergency care to patients whose fetus is no longer “alive,” on the grounds that the patient used an abortion drug earlier in the process. And they aim to deploy this broad fear of “complicity” against the FDA, to demand a nationwide prohibition on the abortion pill to ensure that they need never again see (and be forced to turn away) patients who’ve previously taken it. This is not a theory of being “complicit” in ending life. It is a theory that doctors can pick and choose their patients based on the “moral distress” they might feel in helping them.

It should come as no surprise that the same judge who tried to ban mifepristone in this case, Matthew Kacsmaryk, has also attempted to legalize anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in health care nationwide. This is the ballgame: weaponize subjective religious beliefs against secular society to degrade the quality of care for everyone. If you can’t persuade Americans to adopt hardcore evangelical views, exploit the legal system to coerce them into it anyway.

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine is at once embarrassingly frivolous and existentially important. Don’t let the jokes about how silly the Comstock Act seems , or how speculative the theory of standing is, get in the way of taking a serious look at the claims on offer. The plaintiffs say they are terrified that one day, a patient may walk into their emergency room suffering complications from a medication abortion prescribed by some other doctor. This patient may need their assistance completing the abortion or simply recovering from the complete abortion, which these plaintiffs deem “complicity” in sin. And they say the solution is either a total, nationwide ban on mifepristone, the first drug in the medication abortion sequence, or a draconian (and medically unnecessary) set of restrictions that would place mifepristone out of reach for many patients. (The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5 th Circuit ruled to reinstate those restrictions at their behest.)

It is a twisted line of logic, one that should never have reached the Supreme Court in the first place. But it is also a product of the court’s past indulgence of outlandish claims about moral “complicity.” As was made plain in the oral arguments and briefing, activist doctors are no longer satisfied with personal conscience exemptions already granted under state and federal law; they now insist that nobody, anywhere, should have access to the abortion pill, in order to ensure that they themselves won’t have to treat patients who took one. At a minimum, they say, they should be able to radically roll back access to the pill in all 50 states to reduce the odds that one of these handful of objectors might someday encounter a patient who took it. This extremist argument lays bare the transformation of the idea of “complicity” from a shield for religious dissenters to a sword for ideologues desperate to seize control over other people’s lives and bodies.

At oral arguments, several justices pressed Hawley, who argued on behalf of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, with an obvious retort: Why can’t her clients simply refuse to treat these hypothetical someday patients on the grounds that they cannot help end the “life” of a fetus or embryo? After all, federal law guarantees doctors the right not to have to provide an abortion if doing so is “contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions.” Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh secured assurances from Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, early in the arguments, that under no circumstances could the government force any health care provider to ever participate in an abortion in violation of their conscience. Justice Elena Kagan asked Prelogar: “Suppose somebody has bled significantly, needs a transfusion, or, you know, any of a number of other things that might happen.” Would the plaintiffs object to treating them? Prelogar said the record was unclear.

Hawley, who is married to far-right Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, then approached the lectern and cleared up any confusion: Yes, she insisted, treating a patient who has undergone a medication abortion violates the conscience of the plaintiff physicians even if there is no “live” fetus or embryo to terminate anymore. “Completing an elective abortion means removing an embryo fetus, whether or not they’re alive, as well as placental tissue,” Hawley told Kagan. So the plaintiffs don’t object just to taking a “life.” They also object to the mere act of removing leftover tissue, even from the placenta.

Of course, these doctors must remove “dead” fetal tissue and placentas all the time—from patients who experienced a spontaneous miscarriage. By their own admission, the plaintiffs regularly help women complete miscarriages through surgery or medication. Those women they will gladly treat. Other women, though—the ones who induced their own miscarriage via medication—are too sinful to touch. Before the plaintiffs can administer even lifesaving emergency treatment, they need to know the circumstances of this pregnancy loss: Spontaneous miscarriages are OK; medication abortions are not.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, too, zeroed in on this admission. She told Hawley that she had thought the objection was to “participating in a procedure that is ending the life [of the fetus].” Hawley told her no: Any participation in an abortion, even through the indirect treatment of a patient without a “live” fetus, violated the doctors’ conscience. So, wait. What about “handing them a water bottle?” Jackson asked. Hawley dodged the question, declining to say whether helping a patient hydrate would constitute impermissible complicity in sin.

All this is reminiscent of Little Sisters of the Poor , a case about a Catholic charitable group that was afforded an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. The Little Sisters were asked to check a box signaling to the government that they could not comply with the mandate, at which point the government would step in to cover their employees. But the Little Sisters refused, viewing this action—the checking of a box to opt out of coverage—as “complicity” in abortion because it would in turn trigger government payment for contraception (which they viewed as abortifacients). The Supreme Court and the Trump administration ultimately indulged the Little Sisters’ claim .

Here, we have emergency room physicians asserting that they will not participate in lifesaving medical intervention unless they approve of the reason for the pregnancy loss. Presumably, if the pregnant patient is an unwed mother, or a gay or transgender person, the doctor would be similarly complicit in sin and decline service. Seen through this lens, since one can never know which sins one is enabling in the ER, each and every day, a narrow conscience exemption becomes a sweeping guarantee that absolutely nobody in the country can ever have access to basic health care, let alone miscarriage management. (Of course, these plaintiffs might focus only on one set of “sins” they see as relevant.) In a country effectively governed by Kacsmaryk and his plaintiff friends, a gay person suffering a stroke could be turned away from any hospital because of his sexual orientation, all to spare a doctor from a glancing encounter with prior sin. As Tobias Barrington Wolff, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, put it to us in an email, this unbounded view of complicity “is part of enacting the social death of people and practices you abhor, which in turn can contribute to the material death of people and practices you abhor.”

One of the most exhausting lessons of post- Roe America is that being “pro-life” definitively means privileging the life of the presumptively sin-free unborn—or even their “dead” remains—over the life of the sin-racked adults who carry them. This is why women are left to go septic or to hemorrhage in hospital parking lots; it is why C-sections are performed in nonviable pregnancies, at high risk to mothers; it’s why the women who sued in Texas to secure exceptions to that state’s abortion ban are condemned by the state as sinners and whores . And it’s why—in the eyes of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine — it is a greater hardship for a physician to “waste precious moments scrubbing in, scrubbing out” of emergency surgery, as Hawley put it, so long as they don’t believe that the emergency warrants their professional services, than it is for a pregnant person, anywhere in the country, including in states that permit abortion, to be forced to give birth.

At oral argument, Hawley explained that her clients have “structured [their] medical practice to bring life into the world. When they are called from their labor and delivery floor down to the operating room to treat a woman suffering from abortion drug harm, that is diametrically opposed to why they entered the medical profession. It comes along with emotional harm.” The emotional harm alleged here is that unless these doctors approve of the specific circumstances of the ER visit, they violate not only their own medical preference but also their religious convictions. But they will never truly know enough about the sins of their patients to be able to shield themselves against being a link in a chain of subjective lifelong sin. And to be a doctor, especially an emergency physician, should be to understand that your patients’ private choices and spiritual life are not really open to your pervasive and vigilant medical veto. This deep-rooted suspicion of patients deemed insufficiently pure for lifesaving treatment didn’t begin with the availability of medication abortion. It will assuredly not end there.