Chapter A: Getting Started
The overall scope of re-entry can overwhelm and paralyze a state or local government official-or a community leader or advocate-who is eager to make prisoner re-entry safer or more successful but is unsure where (or how) to begin. The policy statements in this chapter look at two key elements of getting started: convening the right people and analyzing the data.
Inclusive and thoughtful dialogue and examination of the problem of re-entry have yet to be initiated in some states and many local jurisdictions. On the other hand, in most states and in some counties, cities, or communities, a process has already been initiated to facilitate some degree of joint planning around the issue of prisoner re-entry. Every state and US territory, for example, has received a grant under the Serious and Violent Offender Re-Entry Initiative, administered by the US Department of Justice. While the grantee is almost always a state correctional agency (juvenile and/or adult), these agencies have typically established some committee or other vehicle that has brought (and continues to bring) various stakeholders together to analyze the problem and serve as a foundation for collaboration.
Other national initiatives, such as the Transition from Prison to the Community Initiative (TPCI), sponsored by the National Institute of Corrections, or the Re-Entry Policy Academy, coordinated by the National Governors' Association, have coalesced what may have been ad hoc discussions and analyses of the problem. In addition to these programs, at least a few states have other concurrent initiatives operating completely independently of one another: a re-entry committee comprising representatives of different state agencies; a state-level process initiated by the legislature; countywide task forces formed by a sheriff or other county official; "re-entry caucuses" established by one or more mayors in their respective municipalities; and neighborhood-level projects or working groups prompted by community leaders and/or community development organizations.
In seeking to establish, improve, or expand a re-entry initiative, policymakers and practitioners should be aware of the context that these existing initiatives have created in their particular jurisdictions. To what degree have the right people already been brought to the table? What information and data have already been collected? How will new re-entry initiatives draw from and relate to earlier efforts? In a sense, developing a knowledge base means understanding these existing re-entry efforts, as well as exploring data about the population that re-enters and the communities to which they return.
In sum, getting started means getting people together and analyzing the problem. In some jurisdictions, this may mean convening people for the first time and realizing that some key data have never been tracked, whereas in other jurisdictions, it may mean identifying several existing state and local re-entry initiatives, determining their relationship to each other and whether they need to be restructured, and learning from research already collected. The recommendations presented below apply to initiatives at both the statewide and local levels of government, with the expectation that the multiple tiers of planning need to be well coordinated, even though that coordination is tricky. Whatever the re-entry situation in a given jurisdiction, anyone who is committed to ensuring that an appropriate foundation exists for an ongoing or future re-entry initiative will find the recommendations in the following two policy statements relevant and useful for that endeavor.