National Reentry Week: Research on Supporting Reentering Individuals and Their Families

The effects of incarceration and involvement with the criminal justice system are far-reaching and go beyond the individual. Children, families, and communities all experience the effects of someone’s involvement with the criminal justice system. Estimates from the U.S. Department of Justice indicate that each year, more than 600,000 people return to the community after being incarcerated in federal and state prisons, and another 11.4 million people cycle through local jails.

A recent report found that more than five million children — about 7 percent of all U.S. children — have had a parent who lived with them go to jail or prison. And that figure does not include non-residential parents. When people return from prison or jail, their families are often their first line of support, providing shelter, clothes, and emotional support as they transition back to life in the community.

The Department of Justice designated April 24th to 30th, 2016 as National Reentry Week to bring attention to the struggles of individuals returning to the community after incarceration and encourage community action to help them reintegrate. Events will be occurring across the country in every state to share information and resources with individuals and their families, connect individuals and families to services, and help move the conversation forward to make sure justice-involved individuals and their families are supported pre- and post-release.

In OPRE, we are doing research on how we can better support incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals and their families through ACF programs.

• Our Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project designed and tested interventions in Texas and Washington State to increase the number of incarcerated non-custodial parents who apply for a child support order modification. The intervention in Texas resulted in an 11 percent increase in modification applications, and parents returned their applications more quickly. The findings from our intervention in Washington will be released soon.
• Our Subsidized and Transitional Employment Demonstration (STED) is evaluating the Bridges and Pathways program in Chicago, IL, which provides transitional employment, educational opportunities, and cognitive-behavioral therapy to 16-24 year olds as they are released from incarceration.
• Our Ex-Prisoner Reentry Strategies Study is an implementation study of six Responsible Fatherhood grantees. These six grantees engaged fathers while they were incarcerated and provided reentry services pre- and post-release. We recently held a webinar on “Effective Partnerships for Family-Focused Reentry Services” to help practitioners working with families think about how to use partnerships with other organizations to build holistic reentry services for justice-involved individuals and their families.

Recognizing National Reentry Week give us an opportunity to connect our work to the larger efforts to support justice-involved individuals and their families. We hope we can continue the conversation and find more ways to support these individuals and their families after National Reentry Week is over.

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