Concentrating on Reentry Yields Results

There is a lot of talk these days about recidivism and how communities must focus on working with returning offenders. Such issues are a top priority for CCDO, and in Fort Wayne, IN, the Weed and Seed site has decided to truly focus on reentry.

The Fort Wayne/Allen County Weed and Seed effort represents a unique and successful design. It has changed the traditional understanding of a Weed and Seed site and become a model for a "special emphasis" site; that is, a site that concentrates its efforts on one issue or population and applies the Weed and Seed approach to focus on crime reduction in a specific high-crime area, use existing resources, and involve community residents and decisionmakers.

For Fort Wayne members, that meant examining their most serious crime problem and discovering that it originates from offenders who return to the community from prison, jail, and other confinement facilities. So law enforcement and community service organizations spent a year designing a reentry program. Involving community service providers across a wide spectrum of service provision—including labor, health, and education—as well as key decisionmakers allowed Fort Wayne to fully address the reentry issue.

Participants understood that they owned a part of the problem, and that they had the resources to solve it. "The reason why we're so successful is because everyone has a piece of the pie," said Sheila Hudson, Executive Director of Allen County Community Corrections.

Hudson, who directs all supervision, monitoring, and intervention programs for returning offenders, freely admits she used to deal with offenders in a narrow way, but now she looks at the issue of reentry differently. She understands the returning offender's need for community support and involves many community service organizations to provide it.

"I've had one goal—to keep the public safe," she said. "But I could not do it alone, I had to branch out."

The Fort Wayne site focuses exclusively on offenders returning from prison to the southeast quadrant of the city, an area of approximately 50,000 people. It has for years been considered responsible for significant and sustained serious and violent crime in the city, a large percentage of which is committed by returning offenders. The weeding portion of the program involves an array of
control or law enforcement functions. It includes the police, judiciary, and local and state corrections systems (e.g., Allen County Community Correction Center, Indiana Department of Corrections, Allen County Superior Court, City of Fort Wayne Police Department). The control activities involve—

Immediate processing and housing of returning offenders.
Individual assessments that evaluate the offender's risk to the community and the offender's strengths and weaknesses in education, employment and housing needs, mental health and other health care needs, substance abuse, criminal history, and community/familial support networks.
A corresponding reentry plan that addresses eachof the assessed issues.
Electronic monitoring.
Offender management and oversight by community corrections, parole, and local law enforcement personnel.
Provision of support services in a secure setting.
Regular judicial review by the reentry court judge of the returning offenders' compliance with their official reentry plans.

The support services, or seeding functions, involve providing transitional programs, remedial education, employment readiness and job development services, mental health and other health care services, substance abuse treatment, housing, and help in developing support systems that may involve family and/or faith-based and other neighborhood organizations.

Some of these services are provided by the existing human service systems in the community; most are provided at the Community Corrections Center, particularly following initial release. Having all the services in the center, Hudson explained, is more convenient and provides a safe environment for the employees where there is no stigma attached for the offenders or potential employers, as there might be with onsite meetings.

Already, Fort Wayne has seen a significant reduction in recidivism: the percentage of individuals who participated in the program for more than 2 years and were rearrested within 1 year of release was reduced from 45 percent to
22.5 percent. Another evaluation showed the financial benefit of the program. The evaluation estimated a savings to the community of nearly $2 million when comparing the number of crimes committed by participants in the program
to the crimes the participants would have been expected to commit had they not been in the program. In addition, the target neighborhood experienced a 13.5-percent reduction in crime.

Initially the program was something of a hard sell politically, but once the statistics clearly showed the returning offenders' impact on crime rates, the police
department was on board and others followed. Today, the program is recognized as a national model reentry effort by the Office of Justice Programs and has influenced the design and implementation of the Serious and Violent
Offender Reentry Initiative. The Fort Wayne program also was recognized by the U.S. Attorney General and given a financial award to support its efforts. The Indiana Department of Corrections recognized it as a model for reentry services that the department intends to promote throughout the state.

In the future, CCDO envisions developing a limited number of other single-focus sites to address similar social problems that are common to many Weed and Seed sites (e.g., school truancy and dropouts, unemployment, inadequate housing, teen pregnancy, substance abuse, gang violence, economic underdevelopment). Fort Wayne would serve as a training and technical assistance provider to other Weed and Seed communities that want to replicate its innovative reentry strategy.

For further information, contact: Sheila Hudson, Executive Director of Allen County Community Corrections, 260-449-4578.

< Prev		Next >

[ Back ]