Topic: Reentry

When a person is charged with a crime, or issued a traffic ticket, they might be ordered to appear in court. If they don’t show up, however, that violation—known as a failure to appear (FTA)—could result in fines, criminal charges, and incarceration.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Tulsa County Public Defender’s Office (TCPD) and Family & Children’s Services (F&CS) spearheaded an initiative to use state-of-the-art technology to address FTAs, decrease the use of pretrial detention, and increase critical court appearances. The initiative, partially funded by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, is part of a larger goal to seek innovative ways to tackle jail reform.

Holding people who have not been convicted of a crime costs Oklahoma approximately $8.9 million a year. Lowering FTA rates—and reducing the number of people who are arrested and incarcerated for this offense—could not only save money but also reduce the multiple collateral consequence of jail incarceration.

The problem of missed court dates disproportionately impacts members of low-income communities. The majority of these people do not miss court because they are fleeing, but because they just need some help. Common barriers include lack of transportation, daycare, or just the means to pay for a bus token.

The technology we used to address this problem is the Uptrust app, which uses text messages to remind individuals about court dates, and helps to elicit information about barriers that might prevent someone from making it to court in the first place. Individuals can reach out to their attorney about issues related to making it to court. The most innovative feature, however, is the ability to immediately mitigate barriers and other issues by connecting individuals with a case manager from F&CS, Oklahoma’s largest outpatient behavioral health provider.

Officially launched in late January, a case manager from F&CS’s oversees the Uptrust program at the TCPD’s office, working to remedy barriers in addition to connecting individuals with mental health, addiction and basic needs services. Assistant TCPD Glen Blake said they have already seen positive results from using the app. One defendant said, “Without the reminders and the resources offered to me, I wound never had made it to court. This has been needed for a long time.”

Since launching, Uptrust has texted reminders to 4859 clients with 5279 court dates. Whereas the FTA rate was an estimated 15% prior to launch, the FTA rate has dropped to 10.1% in only two months. The goal is to continue to fine-tune our processes until we achieve an FTA rate of under 7%.

TCPD will continue to place an emphasis on community engagement and collaboration among local law enforcement, corrections officials, prosecutors, defenders, judges, and other stakeholders in this work to test, innovate, and drive reform.

Uptrust founder Jacob Sills said, “We hope to replicate this partnership’s mission, and continue to seek ways to mitigate or even avoid unnecessary incarceration. This program allows us to focus on the root of the problem:  what else may be going on in these defendants’ lives.”

Last month—April—was Second Chance Month, a time to focus attention on the millions of people returning home from prison or jail each year. But while April is over, the need to maintain our focus is not. Ensuring that individuals’ reentry is safe and successful matters to everyone. Moving forward, it is heartening to reflect on the momentum that exists now and to begin defining the future of reentry.

A decade ago, one couldn’t imagine a reality in which more than half of the governors currently in office—from both major parties, and states from California to Mississippi—would highlight reentry efforts prominently in their State of the State and inaugural speeches. And it’s not all talk; states and local governments are, in fact, successfully tackling this issue. The National Reentry Resource Center, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance, recently profiled 11 states that have experienced impressive declines in their recidivism rates since the number was at its most recent peak in each state. Four of these states—Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Ohio—saw at least a 20-percent decline in their three-year reincarceration rate in this timespan. Over the same periods, each state also saw their propery and violent crime rates each drop by at least 15 percent.

Yet we are far from living in a society in which people are afforded all the opportunities and supports they need to live productive lives after serving a prison or jail sentence. The mere fact that a person did not commit a new crime represents just one definition of success—there’s more we have to accomplish. My to-do list for the next decade of reentry work includes three key priorities.

First, we must continue to broaden the reentry coalition. The criminal justice system is far from monolithic. There is a federal system operating more than 130 correctional facilities in addition to 50 separate state corrections systems, not to mention thousands of independent local jail systems and probation and parole agencies that supervise millions of adults on any given day. But corrections leaders, police, prosecutors, and judges from across these diverse systems all say the same thing: We cannot do it alone. That’s why criminal justice agencies are increasingly locking arms with those working in housing, behavioral health, employment, and other sectors to meet our reentry challenges with a unified front.

To be successful, these nascent partnerships must be grown into a fundamental shift in how these governmental and nongovernmental actors think and work. This means policy, funding, and programming decisions must be made collaboratively across multiple agencies, in a way that is inclusive of the voices of those who have been affected by the criminal justice system.

Second, we must scale what works. We now have a rich body of research on what works to reduce recidivism, and most corrections administrators now develop comprehensive plans that include these practices in a person’s reentry as a core part of their agencies’ mission statements. Yet, state and local agencies still struggle to fund and implement three essential elements across their systems. For example, when properly used, administering risk and needs assessments on people who are incarcerated is essential to ensuring they are connected to the right services and level of intensity of supervision. While nearly every state has now adopted such assessments, too many have yet to ensure the accuracy, fairness, and transparency of their use. In addition, supervision caseloads remain unmanageably high in most states, leaving probation and parole officers struggling to apply the research-backed support necessary to help a person change their behavior. For instance, in Alabama, supervision officers—who were responsible for approximately 200 individuals each—struggled to manage their caseloads, until the state invested in 100 additional staff. And far too often, treatment for addiction and mental illness is not accessible or delivered with sufficient quality to meet the needs of people likely to relapse and reoffend.

State and local policymakers must be ready and willing to invest in scaling what works while also questioning administrators about whether these practices are being implemented with fidelity.

Lastly, we must do a better job of measuring success. To understand whether reentry efforts are having their intended impact, elected and appointed officials need more timely access to metrics of recidivism as well as data on other measures of success, such as housing, employment, sobriety, and more. Right now, states are woefully ill-equipped to report on recidivism—at least 35 states do not currently report reconviction or rearrest data on those released from prison. While the research on what works is more robust than ever, efforts to evaluate existing and new initiatives will continue to be hindered without a transformation in how data on reentry is collected, analyzed, and shared.

These three pillars of work are not the result of weeks or months—but of years of effort—and the National Reentry Resource Center is in this for the long haul. I look forward to celebrating many more Second Chance Months to come and to our country one day being so responsive to the dignity and potential of our returning citizens that a national awareness campaign no longer feels necessary.

Nicole Jarrett is the director of the National Reentry Resource Center and leads the Corrections and Reentry Division at The Council of State Governments Justice Center.

Providing programs in jail that teach job skills and prepare inmates for employment will reduce the chance that they will return after they are released—saving money in the long run and improving public safety. However, meaningful inmate programming can be costly. Creative use of existing staff and vendors can, nonetheless, yield impressive results, as we found in Milwaukee.

The Milwaukee County House of Correction (HOC), which supervises most of the county’s sentenced population, historically has not offered any substantial inmate educational activities, pre-employment programming, or job training. When County Executive Chris Abele took over management of the HOC in May of 2013 and began working with advocates and experts across the criminal justice system, the HOC was able to implement several programs that give inmates a chance to break the cycle of incarceration and give back to the community.

Although some of the inmate programming activities implemented at the HOC since May of 2013 are paid through the HOC operations budget, many were established by using the expertise and dedication of existing staff, leveraging vendor contracts, and by partnering with community groups. These programs use a small amount of the budget, but provide a significant impact that can assist inmates to become more employable and prepared for reentry upon release.

When using vendor contracts and staff roles to build new programs, it can be particularly effective to involve staff or vendors in the development of a program from the beginning. The Preparation for Success Program, a six-week pre-employment training program implemented in late 2014, was conceived, developed, and implemented by an HOC programs officer. Our program officers typically schedule events or presenters, supervise inmates on work crews, escort them to activities, and make sure programs run on time, in addition to being available for various other tasks as needed. The Preparation for Success program is presented as part of these regular duty activities and only requires a small amount of materials, but successfully promotes self-esteem, empowerment, and confidence by assisting inmates in practical job preparation skills such as filling out applications or drafting cover letters and resumes.

In another case, during a process to hire a vendor to run foodservice operations at the HOC, each vendor was required as part of their bid to propose a culinary job training program for inmates at no cost to the HOC (i.e., the cost of the program would not be paid through a portion of fees paid to the vendor). The successful bid vendor proposed—and has been conducting—a nationally recognized restaurant and food safety training and certification program for the inmates, IN2WORK, since January of 2014.

Other programs do require dedicated financial support, but it can often be obtained by a combination of grants, community partnerships, and small initial investments from existing budgets. For example, the Home2Stay program provides job training in welding, applied mathematics, and machining through a United States Labor Department grant obtained by Word of Hope Ministries. The HOC assists with the screening of participants and provides transportation for inmates to the instruction and training sites.

Earlier this year, the HOC established a Vermiculture operation—or worm farm—on HOC grounds.  The program produces worms to feed reptiles at the Milwaukee County Zoo as well as worm casings to be used as organic fertilizer by groups such as local garden organizations. It develops job training skills, demonstrates entrepreneurship, and provides inmates with an opportunity to give back to the community and make productive use of their time during confinement. The HOC made an initial purchase for supplies and stock from existing programming funds to get the program started, but after that, a portion of the casings that the worms produce are exchanged with a vendor for fresh materials for further processing at no cost to the HOC.

Through the dedication of HOC staff as well as the collaboration of justice system stakeholders, advocates, community organizations, and businesses, in less than three years we have been able to grow from virtually no substantive programming to offering dozens of programs that provide meaningful reentry support, with nearly 78% of eligible inmates involved in at least one (all inmates who are sentenced to the HOC are eligible). We now look forward to making other collaborative changes to the way we use the HOC as one of the jurisdictions selected to participate in the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, a national initiative to change the way America thinks about and uses jails. As our experience shows, budget concerns in strapped local jails across the country should not prevent the development of reentry programming, but encourage it, as creative collaboration will result in supportive options for individuals that can reduce recidivism, improve public safety, and save costs.