Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/KellyDedelJohnson

This report describes the effects of prisoner reentry on communities and the impact on community safety and public perceptions of crime. The role of the police is examined by outlining the benefits of applying community policing strategies to prisoner reentry and exploring opportunities for police involvement. The report highlights specific examples from the field of how new police roles in prisoner reentry have been put into practice across the nation. A discussion of the potential organizational and community-level challenges to expanding law enforcement's role in reentry follows, along with suggested strategies for overcoming these obstacles and opportunities for advancing police reentry initiatives from both a practical and a policy perspective.

The eighth meeting of the Reentry Roundtable, held in May 2004, addressed the nexus between reentry and community policing in the context of public safety. This meeting summary is a synopsis of the two-day discussion among academics, practitioners, service providers, and community leaders convened by the Urban Institute. This document reconstructs the discussion in the chronological order in which it unfolded, including highlights of presentations by the authors of commissioned papers and the discussions that flowed from them. In order to promote the free flow of ideas, it was decided that individuals' names would not be attributed to comments given during the Roundtable discussion.

The fifth Reentry Roundtable, held in May 2003, focused on policies, practices, problems, and incentives involved in connecting returning prisoners to meaningful employment. Five discussion papers and four presentations were commissioned and, combined with the discussions that came out of the Roundtable and additional literature from the field, form the conceptual framework for the monograph addressing prisoner reentry and work. The report addresses the in-prison and post-prison work experiences of prisoners and transition planning.

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