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INTRODUCTION

Prisoner reentry—the process of leaving prison and returning to society—has generated tremendous attention among policy makers, public officials, corrections agencies, service providers, and the general public in recent years (see Sidebar 8 on the National Reentry Initiatives at the end of this report). To veterans of the corrections and law enforcement communities, "prisoner reentry" may appear to be simply a new name for something that has been occurring since the first prisoners were incarcerated in this country more than three centuries ago. Indeed, roughly 95 percent of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons are eventually released.¹ Yet prisoner reentry today presents new and greater challenges for a number of reasons.² First, prisoners are being incarcerated and released at historic volumes: approximately 656,000 people were released from state and federal prisons in 2003 alone,³ a four-fold increase over the past 2 decades (Figure 1). These returning prisoners are increasingly concentrated in communities that are often crime-ridden and lacking in services and support systems.⁴

Further, despite the fact that correctional spending has increased from approximately $9 billion to $60 billion during the past 20 years,⁵ prisoners are less prepared for reentry than in the past, with a smaller share of prisoners receiving educational programming and substance abuse treatment.⁶ Their limited program involvement is particularly problematic given that the majority of prisoners have serious histories of alcohol and drug addiction,⁷ and many lack the training and life skills to find and keep a job after their release.⁸ This depiction of prisoner reentry in the United States has clear implications for the individual challenges prisoners face in leading productive, law-abiding lives on the outside, yet these challenges also pose a distinct threat to public safety. Prisoners who are not prepared to stay sober, find a job, secure housing, and avoid trouble will more than likely reoffend. In fact, more than two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested for a new crime within 3 years of release.⁹ Communities are thus confronted with a dual challenge: to provide former prisoners with the services and environment necessary to navigate the transition from prison to the community, and to protect the public from potential harm.

For many reasons, the expertise of police has not been fully brought to bear on these reentry challenges. In an effort to examine these issues from a community policing perspective, the Urban Institute, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (the COPS Office), invited practitioners, policymakers, academics, and service providers to participate in a Reentry Roundtable to discuss ways in which the role of police could expand beyond actions traditionally taken in this arena (see Sidebar 1 on the Reentry Roundtable). The discussions and papers generated from the Roundtable, along with a scan of police reentry practices in the field and a review of additional literature on the topic, form the content of this report.

This report explores the links between prisoner reentry and community policing in the context of enhancing public safety. Its goal is to encourage new thinking and generate innovative responses to reentry that harness the knowledge and expertise of police. The first section describes the local context of reentry, its effect on communities, and its impact on community safety and public perceptions of crime. In the next section, the role of police in reentry is examined. This part of the report describes the basic concepts of community policing and police problem solving, outlines the benefits of applying community policing strategies to prisoner reentry, and explores the many opportunities for police involvement in reentry. We then turn to specific examples from the field of how these new police roles in prisoner reentry have been put into practice across the country. These examples are followed by a discussion of the potential organizational and community-level challenges to expanding law enforcement's role in reentry and suggested strategies for overcoming these obstacles. The report concludes with a discussion of opportunities for advancing police reentry initiatives from both a practical and a policy perspective.

Notes from this section of the report

1 Hughes and Wilson (2005).

2 For an overview of the challenges of prisoner reentry, see Travis, Solomon, and Waul (2001).

3 Harrison and Beck (2005).

4 La Vigne and Kachnowski (2003); La Vigne and Mamalian (2003); La Vigne and Thomson (2003); Lynch and Sabol (2001).

5 Bauer (2002).

6 Lynch and Sabol (2001).

7 Beck (2001).

8 Harlow (2003).

9 Beck and Shipley (1989); Langan and Levin (2002).

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