Understanding Reentry
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Prisoner reentry usually comes to the attention of state and local elected officials, and sometimes members of Congress, when a rare, high-profile tragedy occurs: A violent felon, released from prison before his sentence expired, commits a brutal crime that generates a burst of media coverage and intense scrutiny of corrections operations. Such tragedies, while certainly deserving of policymakers' attention, are often what inform the impressions of the public and their elected representatives about how people are released from correctional facilities to the community and the problems
In fact, these events as recounted in the media, while they often drive policymaking, can be extremely misleading. First, there is no such thing as a release that is typical of all jurisdictions in the United States. How decisions are made about when to release a person from prison or jail is unique to each state. The process by which departments of corrections return a person to the community also varies dramatically from one jurisdiction to another.
A media story focusing on an individual can also draw attention away from a composite sketch of the entire prison and jail populations, including the demographics and characteristics of who is incarcerated and where the populations go after release. For these reasons, any effort to understand the reentry-related problems jurisdictions are confronting should begin with a review of the reentry process; the characteristics of the population exiting correctional facilities; the fiscal, health, and safety implications of their release; and the impact of their return home for families and communities.
I. How and When Individuals Reenter the Community from Prison or Jail
The numbers of people released from prison and jail have become particularly daunting in recent years. As has been well documented, prison and jail populations have surged over the past two decades, growing nearly 600 percent over 30 years; now, there are more than 2 million people incarcerated on any given day in the United States.[27] And, as nearly everyone admitted to a correctional facility returns to the community at some point, there has been a corresponding explosion in jail and prison releases.
In addition to the dramatic increase in the number of prisoners, another historical trend has significantly reshaped the context in which reentry occurs in the United States: prisoners are increasingly completing their sentence while incarcerated.[28]This means that more and more people leave prison or jail without any postrelease supervision. Still, the great majority of returning prisoners (more than four out of five) is subject to some period of postprison supervision in the community.[29] Growing incarceration and release rates over the last two decades have resulted in a growing parolee population, and resources have not kept pace with these increases. Caseloads are higher, per capita spending is lower, and services have diminished.
Such phenomena are attributable in part to elected officials' rejection of some parole policies, or the abolition of the entire system of parole or discretionary release, in many states. At the same time, policymakers in other jurisdictions have maintained their parole systems, but changed their missions and decreased the resources available to them. Probation has undergone even greater growth than parole, and community corrections experts and elected officials are promoting its reinvention in counties across the country. Those changes, too, have varied tremendously, depending on the jurisdiction.
Because the extent and implications of these changes really depends on the jurisdiction, it becomes impossible to make too many national generalizations about how, and under what circumstances, people are released from correctional facilities. Considering the scope of the problem at the state and local level is not necessarily any less overwhelming, but it is essential to understanding why the issue of reentry must be addressed within the context of each jurisdiction and not uniformly at a national level. Whether release from incarceration is discretionary or mandatory and which, if any, authority is responsible for supervising the offender upon release, depends on the jurisdiction. Probation departments vary tremendously from one jurisdiction to another, including how and when probation is used (e.g., in lieu of prison or jail, in addition to a period of incarceration) and where the agency sits on the county or state organizational chart (under the judiciary, public safety, or corrections). Add to these factors the supports and services made available to available to individuals before and after release, and the national reentry picture that emerges is actually a mosaic of distinct images, each unique to the corresponding jurisdiction.
II. Characteristics of the Population
Close analysis of the population returning from prison and jail to the community shatters some common perceptions while confirming others.
Demographics
Most returning prisoners (88 percent) are male. Their median age is 34 and their median education level is 11th grade.[30] People released from prison are disproportionately black or Latino. In 1998, more than half of returning prisoners were white (55 percent) and 44 percent were black.[31] Twenty-one percent of parolees were considered Hispanic.[32]
Criminal Histories and Lengths of Stay
As the preceding section indicates, the criminal histories of people in prison today are substantially different from the criminal records of prison populations in the last two decades. Today, the percentage of people released from prison following a conviction for a drug offense is twenty percent higher than it was in 1984, totaling about one-third of all released prisoners.[33] Ironically, violent offenders are not the category of admissions most responsible for the boom in prison and jail populations. Offenders incarcerated for committing a violent offense make up less of the prison population than they did 20 years ago: one-fourth of all prisoners are released following a conviction for a violent offense (down from 32 percent in 1985).[34]
People in prison today typically have a history of involvement with the criminal justice system. Nearly half have been convicted of a violent offense at some point in the past.[35] Three-fourths of state prisoners have been sentenced to probation or incarcerated at least once; 43 percent have been sentenced to probation or incarcerated at least three times.[36]
People are in prison for longer periods today, on average, than they were several years ago. Since 1990, the length of time prisoners served prior to release has increased 25.5 percent.[37] Prisoners in 1990 spent an average of 22 months in correctional facilities, while those released in 1998 spent 28 months incarcerated.[38]
III. Characteristics of the Communities to which Prisoners Return
For prison and jail systems across the country, an increasing percentage of prisoners hails from just a few communities in the corresponding state. For example, 59 percent of Maryland prisoners released in 2001 returned to Baltimore City.[39] Moreover, individuals tended to return to one of just a few communities within the city, including Southwest Baltimore, Greater Rosemont, and Sandtown-Winchester.[40] In Connecticut, almost half of the prison and jail population is from just a handful of neighborhoods in five cities, areas which have the most concentrated levels of poverty and nonwhite populations in the state.[41]
There is a corresponding void of young men, often nonwhite, in these communities. For example, in some Brooklyn neighborhoods, one out of eight parenting-age males is admitted to jail or prison in single year.[42] In Cleveland, Ohio, on certain blocks that contribute disproportionately large numbers of people to state prison, somewhere between 8 and 15 percent of the young black males are incarcerated on a given day.[43]
As indicated earlier, when in state prison, these men are not forever exiled from their communities; on average, they return in less than two and a half years.[44] Studies have indicated that, as prisoners preparing for release, these individuals typically rely on their families for housing. Of a large sample of prisoners interviewed in Illinois prior to their release, 69 percent stated that they had prearranged housing following release from prison; most (72 percent) expected to live with a family member.[45] Among the 31 percent who did not yet have housing lined up, the most common method for trying to find housing was to contact a family member (40 percent).[46]
Their plans to provide the returning relative with a place to live notwithstanding, these families are not always ready to be reunited with their spouse, partner, sibling, child, grandchild, or other relative. Neighbors and the surrounding community are likely even less equipped to receive someone from prison or jail.
These are, at best, fragile situations, made especially precarious by the absence of services (such as health care and drug treatment), employment opportunities, affordable housing, and supports in the surrounding area. In California, for example, one study found significant gaps between the needs of parolees and available services: only 200 shelter beds for more than 10,000 homeless parolees, four mental health clinics for 18,000 psychiatric cases, and 750 treatment beds for 85,000 released substance abuses.[47]
Often, the only organized support networks that exist in abundance in these underserved communities are churches. Not only are leaders of these institutions not necessarily trained, organized, or funded to support people returning from prison, but also parishioners sometimes feel deep ambivalence about how and whether to apply the limited resources of the one stable institution in their lives to people who have broken the law.
For these reasons, reentry is, in the end, an issue largely about the lives of people in the disproportionately few communities where people who have been incarcerated are concentrated. Any strategy to address this issue must go beyond individual releasees, or offender populations generally, and even when the person is still in prison or jail, have in mind the places to which that person will return.