The Reentry Project

Every year in the United States, 600,000 people – about 1,600 a day – return from jail and prison to the communities from which they come, disproportionately low-income communities of color. In 2001, 7,500 of those released came home to Harlem and East Harlem alone. Like others across the country, they bring back with them many of the same substance abuse, health, housing, and employability issues that contributed to their being locked up in the first place. They face not-always-obvious barriers erected by laws and customs that impede the reentry of all those with a criminal record. They find themselves more carefully scrutinized by everyone from law enforcement officials to family members. And they learn that even their smallest slip-ups can newly entangle them in the criminal justice system, leading many back to incarceration.

Drawing on our staffers’ and consultants’ decades of experience in this field (and on the network of interested parties with whom we work), the Center for Community Problem Solving helps the formerly incarcerated and their families deal with a range of economic, health, social, and political problems; shape reentry policies and practices; and persuade everyone of the need for better coordinated problem-solving services. Teaming up with people with criminal records and their families, service providers, researchers, government agencies, and private foundations, we are developing community education programs, cultivating consortiums of problem solvers, providing consultation to (and recruiting pro bono advocates to help represent) the formerly incarcerated and their families, and implementing empirical studies to generate knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in reentry.

Having focused most closely on Harlem and East Harlem, we have already begun to expand our work to help the formerly incarcerated and their families living in other low-income, of color, and immigrant neighborhoods in the metropolitan New York area. Most prominently, we are gathering and sharing qualitative and quantitative data about issues surrounding reentry that we’ve collected through The Neighborhood Legal Needs & Resources Project. We are specially designing our Fair & Just Workplace Campaign and Streetwise About Money Campaign to meet the particular needs of people with criminal records and their families and communities. We are designing and implementing our pilot version of The Consumer Survey of Problem-Solving Resources to provide our constituents with the opportunity to share with each other and others still their experiences with those institutions to which they have turned for help. And we are connecting those who have done time in prisons and jails with available resources in the community through our Reentry Orientation Program and accompanying The Reentry Guide: A Handbook for People Coming Out of Jail or Prison and for Their Families and Communities, an extraordinarily well-researched and accessibly written treasure of basic information central to making it in everyday life.