Chapter A: Admission to the Facility
The point at which a person is incarcerated-once he or she has been sentenced and committed to a correctional facility-marks the beginning of a window of opportunity to gather information about that person and to prepare him or her for a safe and successful re-entry to the community. Historically, incoming prisoners have been questioned and assessed only for classification purposes and have routinely served out the length of their sentences with little or no preparation for eventual release. Correctional policies and practices have more recently begun to shift towards capitalizing on this opportunity to engage individuals in planning for re-entry from the first days and weeks of their commitment period. Accurate and timely screening (to quickly determine acute conditions and areas in need of further assessment) and assessement (to determine detailed risks, needs, and strengths identified during screening) are critical to planning a person's path out of prison for good.
The earlier that staff and administrators of correctional institutions , along with those who are incarcerated, begin to think about re-entry, the more thorough and comprehensive that planning and programming can be. Efforts by corrections agencies to look beyond prison walls-to foster the engagement of community-based organizations and agencies in the process of intake, assessment, and individual program planning within the institution-ensure the best allocation of staff resources. They also lead to relationships that encourage pro-social, law-abiding behavior by individuals during incarceration and after release, thus serving the interests of the entire community.
Policy Statement 8, Development of Intake Procedure, primarily addresses the screening and assessment that is necessary to understand the needs, risks, and strengths of the men and women who will one day be released to the community. Policy Statement 9, Development of Programming Plan, considers how to match information about individuals obtained during intake with available resources in order to create effective strategies for preparing those individuals for release while those individuals are incarcerated. While the strategies are described as discrete processes, neither intake nor program planning can be meaningful without attention to the other, and coordinated implementation of both is fundamental to achieving successful re-entry.