Jail Reentry Roundtable Meeting Summary

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1. Introduction and Meeting Overview

Over the past five years, there has been substantial momentum around the issue of prisoner reentry. It is now well known that some 650,000 prisoners return from state and federal prisons each year, facing a myriad of challenges and high recidivism rates. At the same time, little attention has been paid to the issue of reentry from local jails, despite the fact that jails process more than 12 million admissions and releases each year.

With support from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Urban Institute, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the Montgomery County Department of Correction and Rehabilitation have partnered to convene a Reentry Roundtable on the topic of reentry from jails. Over the past six years, the Urban Institute has held eight Reentry Roundtables, each focusing on a different aspect of prisoner reentry with the aim of advancing knowledge and creating policy opportunities to improve outcomes. This ninth Reentry Roundtable focused attention—for the first time at the national level—on those 12 million individuals released from local jails each year. The two-day meeting, held June 27–28, 2006 at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., brought together leading jail administrators, researchers, corrections and law enforcement professionals, county and community leaders, service providers, and former inmates to discuss the unique dimensions, challenges, and opportunities of jail reentry (see participant list on the following page).

Informing the Roundtable discussion were a set of papers that focus on the following jail reentry issues: inmate challenges, short-term interventions, community supervision, evidence-based reentry practices in the jail setting, reentry from jails for females, the economics of jail reentry, jail to community linkages, and reentry from rural jails. A summary of the Roundtable presentations and discussion follows.

All papers, presentations, and materials developed for the Jail Reentry Roundtable Initiative are available on the Roundtable website: http://www.urban.org/projects/reentry-roundtable/roundtable9.cfm

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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