Helping Ex-Prisoners Reconnect to Life

 Initiatives

Why Faith-based Re-entry is so Very Important to You and Our Communities

Wisconsin’s prison population has doubled since 1995 and the state corrections budget is over a billion dollars.  Thousands of Wisconsin men and women are now in prison – disproportionately black men and women, shattering families and endangering children.  When they return to the communities many find limited resources and hands in helping and healing, so they return to prison and the cycle continues with far reaching consequences for our lives in Wisconsin.

Middle Passage II - The Lifecycle of Re-Entry intends to head off the trend of lost lives by using a faith-based approach to provide teaching/learning tools to help heal the hurt and begin to prepare a place for people to put their lives together with a positive purpose in mind.

When is the last time you wrote a letter to a friend or family member you know is in prison?  We all know someone in prison.  We have come to regard people in prison as the throw away portion of the population and this needs to change!

How You Can Become Involved

Important facts you need to know:

Prisoner Re-entry for Families and Communities (from the Annie E. Casey Foundation)

The growth in the U.S. prison population has had a major impact on families, communities, and state budgets. Its impacts have been most profound, however, among people of color and within poor, disinvested neighborhoods. In fact, for the most disinvested neighborhoods, it is not possible to talk about building community, economically or socially, without addressing both the conditions and policies leading to incarceration and the programs and strategies developed to enable ex-offenders to successfully return to their communities.

From an economic perspective, the population of currently and formerly incarcerated residents in disinvested communities represents a large and disproportionate share of the working-age population —a population that must be in the workforce if these neighborhoods are to become economically viable.  The absence of primarily young men, disproportionately of color, reduces the labor pool, and their reentry back into the community creates its own set of challenges and opportunities.

From a family strengthening perspective, the ex-offender population is parent to many of the children and youth within these neighborhoods. These children and their families face special challenges while a parent is incarcerated and when that parent is released.  The ex-offender’s roles and responsibilities as a parent need to be addressed and supported—both during incarceration and upon reentry.

Under current policies and practices, newly released prisoners face major challenges assuming or reassuming economic and social roles in the community.  They usually receive little training, preparation, or support while in prison to prepare them for reentry and often finding themselves further behind when they leave prison than when they entered.

What Happens to the Families of Those Who Go to Prison?

Despite periodic public attention paid to the fourfold growth in the prison population and the release of more than 600,000 individuals from prison each year, the heart of the matter continues to be ignored: these individuals are the children, parents, siblings, and spouses of millions of Americans.

Like people in prison, prison families are growing in number but are virtually unseen or undetected by society.  These families have been traumatized and are often in serious need of economic and social support, and their trauma impacts their communities—yet, because of the fear, denial, and stigma attached to imprisonment, this population has until recently received scant attention from human service planners and providers. The strengths and assets of these families are also virtually invisible except to those who know them.

The impact of imprisonment on families is not well understood by the general public and not fully appreciated by the families themselves, the prisoners, or the systems that they often struggle to navigate.  For spouses and domestic partners with children, incarceration of the partner often results in a threefold loss—of emotional support, economic support, and parental support.

What Happens When People Come Home from Prison?

Coming home from prison is cause for celebration but fraught with anticipation and expectations that are often unfulfilled, leaving reentering prisoners and their families with significant challenges. Many of these challenges are exacerbated by the growing number of people being released from prison into a shrinking number of communities, and by the combination of increased sentences and reduced in-prison services to support successful reentry.

A central problem is this: The challenges families face during incarceration are not solved upon release. While strong, positive family ties significantly improve prospects for successful reentry, people leaving prison also may place significant strain on their families and neighborhoods.

This strain is magnified by numerous barriers: For example, many employers disqualify applicants who have been convicted of crimes. Many subsidized housing agencies turn away those with drug convictions, leaving the former prisoner’s family to choose between being with their loved one and having a home. Loans for higher education and a range of other benefits can be unavailable to those with a criminal history. Depending on federal, state, and local policies, people who have been in prison can lose voting rights, be deported, lose parental rights, and face other barriers to reunification.

Repeat imprisonments increase the difficulty of reentering the community: families break up, chances of employment drop, and contact with and identification with criminals increase as imprisonments accumulate. Of all people released from prison in the United States in 1994, 51.8 percent were back in prison within three years, more than half of them for technical violations such as parole infractions.  The circumstances into which the individual is released have a great deal of impact on his or her likelihood of recidivism:  Living with a spouse, arranging for post-release employment during incarceration, living in a less populated area, and living in an area with a low poverty rate (as long as the former prisoner is employed) all increase chances of staying out of prison.

Emotional factors also play a role in how people fare upon release from prison. Many experience a kind of post-traumatic stress that makes it difficult for them to reconnect with family members, hold jobs, maintain sobriety, and nurture relationships. Higher-than-average numbers of people in prison have been homeless, are mentally ill, and have infectious diseases, adding to the challenges of post-release adjustment.

How Do Families Support Prisoner Re-entry?

The most significant resource for supporting prison families consists of the prisoners and families themselves. Both logic and research suggest that families are the reentry program of first and last resort.   At least one study has found that people who have family ties during incarceration do better when released than those without such ties.  Similarly, research by the Vera Institute of Justice finds strong family support or involvement to be an important indicator of successful reintegration, correlating with reduced criminal activity, less drug use, and better employment outcomes.  Family involvement positions the former prisoner to not only benefit from, but contribute to, the well-being of his or her children, family, and community.

What does a family do to provide support to an incarcerated member? During incarceration, family members and community leaders visit the prisoner regularly, listening, sharing thoughts and feelings, and bringing news of developments on the outside.  Church leaders, teachers, and other community leaders and members keep the incarcerated person in their thoughts and conversations. They take concrete steps to prepare for the incarcerated person’s release, including preparing a place for him or her to stay; locating or forming support groups, counseling, and substance abuse recovery programs; and researching employment, job training, and education possibilities.

Staying connected to an incarcerated person can be extremely difficult, emotionally and practically: Policies and procedures routinely separate incarcerated people from their families. Men typically are incarcerated an average of 100 or more miles from where their children live, and women 160 or more.

More than 50 percent of incarcerated fathers and mothers report never having a visit from their children in prison. Even phone calls home are off-limits for many, costing families hundreds or thousands of dollars a year

How Can Neighborhoods Support Prisoner Re-entry?

Neighborhood support is crucial to the successful reentry of people who have been in prison into communities and families. Schools, preschools, and child care providers; religious institutions; health clinics; and other influential community institutions can—if informed, prepared, supported, and connected— help all family members deal with the challenges of incarceration. Examples of some effective neighborhood- based programs are included in the Resources section.