Safer Return

The Safer Return demonstration harnessed a full range of community-based public and private organizations to support people coming home to Chicago’s Garfield Park neighborhood from Illinois state prison from 2008 to 2013. Despite implementation challenges, Safer Return was able to improve reentry outcomes for participants relative to comparisons who did not participate, though not as much as had been hoped for. The lessons we can learn from Safer Return’s successes and challenges will no doubt prove useful for future reentry programming efforts.