Prisoner Reentry and Community Policing

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

History of the Reentry Roundtable

Four years ago, the Urban Institute launched a major research and policy development initiative on the issue of prisoner reentry, with a broad substantive agenda that encompasses criminal justice policy as well as the impact of incarceration and reentry on children, families, former prisoners, communities, and civil society. (A prospectus of Urban Institute's reentry activities can be found at http://www.urban.org.) One of the key components of this initiative has been the creation of the Reentry Roundtable—a group of prominent academics, practitioners, community leaders, policymakers, advocates, and former prisoners that convenes about twice a year to push the envelope of research and practice. Additionally, about a hundred individuals (including practitioners, researchers, foundation officers, and community members) are invited to observe meetings of the Roundtable, and have been impressed with the breadth and stature of people who have joined the Roundtable to become part of a larger national network. The mission of the Roundtable is to develop new thinking about the issue of prisoner reentry, broadly defined.

The first meeting of the Roundtable was held in the fall of 2000, with the purpose of exploring the many dimensions of the reentry issue. The Urban Institute commissioned discussion papers by leading academics examining the state of knowledge on this topic from a variety of perspectives—health, substance abuse, family, gender, race, employment, community capacity, and state criminal justice policies. Those papers (and two others on mental health and victims' perspectives) were published in a special issue of Crime and Delinquency (Volume 47, Issue 3, 2001). They also provided the basis for the Urban Institute monograph entitled "From Prison to Home: The Dimensions and Consequences of Prisoner Reentry."

Following that meeting, the Urban Institute designed a multistate longitudinal study on prisoner reentry, entitled "Returning Home." At the second meeting of the Roundtable in March 2001, the meeting focused attention on that design, with special attention to understanding the impact of reentry on family and community. The Urban Institute has completed the pilot study of Returning Home in Maryland and are implementing the full study in Illinois, Ohio, and Texas.

The third session of the Roundtable, held in March 2002, focused on the role of the institutions of civil society in creating barriers and bridges to the successful reintegration of record numbers of former prisoners. The papers from that meeting have been published on the Urban Institute's website (http://www.urban.org). The fourth meeting, held in December 2002, examined the nexus between prisoner reentry and health. Those papers were published in a special issue of the Journal of Correctional Health Care (Volume 10, Issue 3, Fall 2003). The fifth meeting examined the employment dimension of prisoner reentry. A monograph report based on the findings of that Roundtable is available though the Urban Institute website. The sixth meeting of the Reentry Roundtable, entitled "The Youth Dimensions of Prisoner Reentry: Youth Development and the Impacts of Incarceration and Reentry," was held in San Francisco at the end of May 2003. The papers from this session were published in a special issue of Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice (Volume 2, Issue 1, 2004). The seventh meeting of the Reentry Roundtable, entitled "Housing, Homelessness, and Prisoner Reentry," was held in October 2003. A monograph report based on the findings of that Roundtable will be available in Fall 2004.

The eighth Reentry Roundtable was held in May 2004. With funding support from the Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing, this meeting of the Roundtable addressed the nexus between reentry and community policing in the context of public safety. What follows is a synopsis of the two-day discussion among academics, practitioners, service providers, and community leaders convened by the Urban Institute. These individuals were brought together to share their perspectives on the role of law enforcement in tackling the issue of prisoner reentry. 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 Urban Institute is in the process of producing a monograph report of this meeting that will be available in Spring 2005. Full-text versions of the commissioned working papers are available at http://www.urban.org.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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