B: Addressing Core Challenges
Policy Statement 4: Funding a Re-Entry Initiative
Recommendation D: Cultivate volunteers from community and faith-based groups to increase staffing and program capacity.
Engaging volunteers and student interns from the community to provide services inside prisons or jail, or to facilitate a prisoner's transition to the community following his or her release, has numerous benefits. Volunteers provide free labor, helping to provide services that corrections administrators and other system officials often do not have the budget to fund fully. In addition, volunteers add considerable value to programs and services that target children, families, and victims of prisoners. Given their commitment to service (to the extent that they are willing to work in a prison or jail without any compensation) volunteers elicit a sense of trust and goodwill among prisoners, which is crucial to their engagement in treatment programs. (See Policy Statement 14, Behaviors and Attitudes, for more on strategies to engage prisoners in institutional programming.)
In addition, volunteers can supplement programming for prisoners by serving as role models for healthy behaviors. Volunteers who come from the communities to which prisoners are likely to return, or who have faced similar challenges in their lives (such as incarceration or struggles with substance abuse), can mentor prisoners and demonstrate how to seek a constructive path to reintegration into the community. Furthermore, volunteers' involvement with individuals while they are incarcerated provides a foundation for them to maintain contact after the person's release. For a corrections or community corrections employee, such continuity of care is considerably harder to realize.
Example: Women's Mentorship Program, Rhode Island Department of Corrections
Women within three to six months of release are paired with volunteer mentors through the Women's Mentorship Program. Mentors undergo training and receive ongoing guidance from a volunteer coordinator who is a corrections staff member, including monthly meetings to discuss challenges and share experiences. The mentorship provides the prototype of a healthy, trusting relationship for female inmates who may have misplaced trust or been cut off from healthy relationships before or during their engagement with the criminal justice system. A preliminary study showed that after one year, the rate of recidivism among participants was 25 percent, versus 40 percent among a control group of non-participants.
The presence of volunteers in correctional institutions and among teams of community-based service providers is a useful measure of whether corrections administrators and social service and health systems have in fact reoriented the culture of their systems to effectively address issues regarding prisoner re-entry. Volunteers help to bridge the enormous physical and psychological divide that separates the community and the institutions, reminding staff about the communities to which prisoners will return and adding to the cultural competence of corrections or community corrections staff.
Example: Shadow / Mentorship Program, Islamic Health and Human Services (MI)
Mentors are matched with men released from prisons in Michigan who have made a commitment to Islam. Mentors meet with or contact individuals frequently during the first three to four months after their release from prison, primarily to refer releasees to resources within the extensive Muslim community. Participants in the program are expected to attend the same mosque for Friday prayers weekly, to enable community members to get to know them; and to recognize disrupted patterns, which might indicate a risk of relapse or recidivism. Members of the community have provided minimum-wage jobs to nearly all program participants, and some participants have even stayed in mosques after release.
Despite the benefits of involving volunteers in organizations serving prisoners and other groups affected by re-entry, there are important considerations that should discourage agency officials from reaching out to volunteers too hastily. Similarly, policymakers encouraging systems to make better use of volunteers (or charities or individuals seeking more volunteer opportunities around prisoner re-entry issues) need to keep several issues in mind.
First,
corrections administrators or policymakers should not look to volunteers as
substitutes for professionals who deliver programs and services. Typically, the
number of volunteers and their availability does not approach the demand for
services that exists inside prison or jail or in the community among people with
criminal records. Most programs need to be provided several times a week, and
client-to-provider ratios must be limited to ensure effective service delivery.
And, whereas most volunteers offer their time at night and on the weekends, it
is during traditional office hours on weekdays that most programming must be
provided.
Second, while they may not charge for the time they work, volunteers do generate costs. For example, they require some training about working in a secure facility and about the obstacles that prisoners reintegrating into the community face.[39] They also need coaching, which can be time-intensive, about the elements of services most likely to have an impact on the client. Without the proper oversight, volunteers can end up leading lengthy rap sessions, which accomplish little and compromise the integrity of the programming already provided. Finally, because volunteers sometimes plunge themselves into this work--with little appreciation for how emotionally draining providing services to prisoners, their families, or victims can be--they can burn out quickly. As a result, the time allocated to train and monitor volunteers who quit weeks after they begin working may very well undermine the investment.
The potential pitfalls of using volunteers are easily outweighed by the invaluable services they can provide. To avail themselves of this invaluable resource, which, after all, is free, corrections administrators should address the cautions described above and take steps to forge a successful working relationship between volunteers and staff working in the institution. Some immediate impediments to such a relationship are the distinct perspectives of corrections employees and volunteers. Corrections employees, particularly uniformed officers, are often suspicious of volunteers, whom they may view as naÐve, easily manipulated by dangerous felons, and potential carriers of contraband. On the other hand, volunteers may see corrections officers staff as obstructionist and uninterested in re-entry.
To smooth out such potential rifts, corrections administrators should assign a representative of the agency to coordinate volunteers and to serve as an ongoing liaison between volunteers and institutional staff. This person should be charged with recruiting and screening appropriate volunteers, coordinating appropriate training, helping to overcome logistical obstacles or conflicts between volunteers and staff, and serving as an ongoing resource to volunteers. Shift commanders and other leadership should also communicate with volunteers on a regular basis. To support volunteers who may feel isolated or underappreciated, corrections administrators should facilitate the formation of support groups. Furthermore, corrections administrators should be sure to recognize prominently the important contributions that volunteers make. Appreciation days, honorary dinners or lunches, and periodic awards can all be used for such recognition.
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At least some of these options discussed below contemplate changes to policy that address sentencing and related matters. This discussion is for informational purposes, providing some context for the discussion about changes to policy or law that address postsentencing issues, which can generate revenue that could be applied to a re-entry initiative. As stated in the Introduction to the Report, the policy statements and recommendations in this Report address postsentencing decisions only. For a detailed discussion of these options, see , The Diminishing Returns of Increased Incarceration: A Blueprint to Improve Public Safety and Reduce Costs (The JFA Institute, 2004-07-01) . [
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