Research by Author & Topic

Publications by Nancy G. La Vigne on Cities and Metropolitan Regions

In 2002, the Urban Institute established the Reentry Mapping Network (RMN), a partnership of jurisdictions throughout the country that are engaged in mapping and analyzing prisoner reentry and community data to help inform local policies and practices. This report describes the methods underlying the RMN so that other jurisdictions can learn from these experiences and replicate their efforts in the interests of crafting more effective and successful reentry strategies at the community level. These experiences learned are derived from the three RMN partners funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ): Washington, DC, Winston-Salem, NC, and Milwaukee, WI.

This paper describes an ongoing initiative funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the National Institute of Justice. Now under way, the initiative is designed to help address the formidable challenge created as large numbers of former prison inmates return to a relatively small number of inner-city neighborhoods. In this project, NNIP partners and other local data intermediaries are obtaining data on the prison populations to assess the timing and magnitude of the challenge in each neighborhood. They are then working with a number of local agencies, using information in their systems on available services and other neighborhood conditions to help them devise appropriate response strategies.

The number of people released from Maryland prisons in 2001 was nearly twice the number released two decades ago. Well over half of the Maryland prisoners released in 2001 returned to Baltimore City and many were even more concentrated within a few neighborhoods in Baltimore. This report describes the process of prisoner reentry in Maryland by examining the policy context surrounding reentry, the characteristics of Maryland's returning inmates, the geographic distribution of returning prisoners, and the social and economic climates of the communities that are home to the highest concentrations of returning prisoners. [View the corresponding press release.]