M E E T I N G S U M M A R Y Prisoner Reentry and Community Policing: Strategies for Enhancing Public Safety Reentry Roundtable Meeting The Urban Institute Washington, DC May 12-13, 2004 Prepared in partnership with the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice URBAN INSTITUTE research for safer communities Justice Policy Center URBAN INSTITUTE Justice Policy Center 2100 M Street NW Washington, DC 20037 http://www.urban.org © 2005 Urban Institute This project was supported by cooperative agreement # 2003-HS-WX-K044 by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions contained herein are those of the authors(s) and do not necessarily represent the official position of the United States Department of Justice, The Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Acknowledgments We would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of several colleagues and institutions in supporting this meeting of the Reentry Roundtable on Prisoner Reentry and Community Policing: Strategies for Enhancing Public Safety. Early in the life of this project we convened a planning meeting to seek the advice of law enforcement professionals. We are grateful for the contributions of that meeting from representatives of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Police Foundation, National Sheriffs Association, and John Hopkins University Police Executive Leadership Program. At the Urban Institute, we benefited from the assistance of Meagan Funches, Dionne Davis, Demelza Baer, and Erica Lagerson. We are especially grateful for substantive and financial support provided by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). Carl Peed, Director of the COPS Office, and his staff, Pamela Cammarata and Katherine Mc Quay, were enthusiastic and resourceful colleagues who believed that this meeting of the Roundtable would provide valuable guidance to police agencies and communities around the country. KAREN BECKMAN KELLY DEDEL JOHNSON AMY SOLOMON JEREMY TRAVIS History of the Reentry Roundtable Four years ago, the Urban Institute launched a major research and policy development initiative on the issue of prisoner reentry, with a broad substantive agenda that encompasses criminal justice policy as well as the impact of incarceration and reentry on children, families, former prisoners, communities, and civil society. (A prospectus of Urban Institute’s reentry activities can be found at http://www.urban.org.) One of the key components of this initiative has been the creation of the Reentry Roundtable—a group of prominent academics, practitioners, community leaders, policymakers, advocates, and former prisoners that convenes about twice a year to push the envelope of research and practice. Additionally, about a hundred individuals (including practitioners, researchers, foundation officers, and community members) are invited to observe meetings of the Roundtable, and have been impressed with the breadth and stature of people who have joined the Roundtable to become part of a larger national network. The mission of the Roundtable is to develop new thinking about the issue of prisoner reentry, broadly defined. The first meeting of the Roundtable was held in the fall of 2000, with the purpose of exploring the many dimensions of the reentry issue. The Urban Institute commissioned discussion papers by leading academics examining the state of knowledge on this topic from a variety of perspectives—health, substance abuse, family, gender, race, employment, community capacity, and state criminal justice policies. Those papers (and two others on mental health and victims’ perspectives) were published in a special issue of Crime and Delinquency (Volume 47, Issue 3, 2001). They also provided the basis for the Urban Institute monograph entitled “From Prison to Home: The Dimensions and Consequences of Prisoner Reentry.” Following that meeting, the Urban Institute designed a multistate longitudinal study on prisoner reentry, entitled “Returning Home.” At the second meeting of the Roundtable in March 2001, the meeting focused attention on that design, with special attention to understanding the impact of reentry on family and community. The Urban Institute has completed the pilot study of Returning Home in Maryland and are implementing the full study in Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. The third session of the Roundtable, held in March 2002, focused on the role of the institutions of civil society in creating barriers and bridges to the successful reintegration of record numbers of former prisoners. The papers from that meeting have been published on the Urban Institute’s website (http://www.urban.org). The fourth meeting, held in December 2002, examined the nexus between prisoner reentry and health. Those papers were published in a special issue of the Journal of Correctional Health Care (Volume 10, Issue 3, Fall 2003). The fifth meeting examined the employment dimension of prisoner reentry. A monograph report based on the findings of that Roundtable is available though the Urban Institute website. The sixth meeting of the Reentry Roundtable, entitled “The Youth Dimensions of Prisoner Reentry: Youth Development and the Impacts of Incarceration and Reentry,” was held in San Francisco at the end of May 2003. The papers from this session were published in a special issue of Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice (Volume 2, Issue 1, 2004). The seventh meeting of the Reentry Roundtable, entitled “Housing, Homelessness, and Prisoner Reentry,” was held in October 2003. A monograph report based on the findings of that Roundtable will be available in Fall 2004. The eighth Reentry Roundtable was held in May 2004. With funding support from the Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing, this meeting of the Roundtable addressed the nexus between reentry and community policing in the context of public safety. What follows is a synopsis of the two-day discussion among academics, practitioners, service providers, and community leaders convened by the Urban Institute. These individuals were brought together to share their perspectives on the role of law enforcement in tackling the issue of prisoner reentry. This document reconstructs the discussion in the chronological order in which it unfolded, including highlights of presentations by the authors of commissioned papers and the discussions that flowed from them. In order to promote the free flow of ideas, it was decided that individuals’ names would not be attributed to comments given during the Roundtable discussion. The Urban Institute is in the process of producing a monograph report of this meeting that will be available in Spring 2005. Full-text versions of the commissioned working papers are available at http://www.urban.org May 2004 Reentry Roundtable ● Meeting Participants Alfred Blumstein, Carnegie Mellon University David Kennedy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Patrick Bradley, Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety Susan Herman, National Center for Victims of Crime Jim Bueermann (Co-chair), Redlands, California Police Department Gary Hinzman, Sixth Judicial District Department of Correctional Services Edward Davis III, Lowell, Massachusetts Police Department Martin Horn, New York Department of Correction and Probation Walter Dickey, University of Wisconsin School of Law Edmund McGarrell, Michigan State University John Fitzgerald, Hampden County Alan Mobley, University of California-Irvine Massachusetts Jail and House of Correction Brenda Palms-Barber, North Lawndale (Chicago) Ellen Halbert, Travis County Texas, Office of Employment Network the District Attorney Carl Peed, Office of Community Oriented Michael Jacobson, John Jay College Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice of Criminal Justice Charles See, Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry Gary Johnson, Texas Department of Association Criminal Justice Michael Smith, University of Wisconsin Jean Johnson, Public Agenda School of Law Robert Johnson, Anoka County Minnesota, Faye Taxman, Bureau of Governmental County Attorney’s Office Research, University of Maryland Paul Joyce, Massachusetts Executive Office of Jeremy Travis (Co-chair), The Urban Institute Public Safety Reverend Steven Tucker, New Commandment George Kelling, Rutgers University - Newark Baptist Church, Washington, D.C. Contents Section I. Welcome and Meeting Overview....................................................................1 Section II. Presentations and Discussion ........................................................................3 Who Is Leaving Prison?...................................................................................................3 What Public Safety Risk Do Returning Prisoners Pose?.................................................9 Reentry and Safety from a Community Perspective......................................................13 Brick Walls Facing Returning Offenders ......................................................................16 The Roles of the Police in the Offender Reentry Process .............................................20 Placing Reentry in the Context of Sentencing Policy....................................................24 Promoting Public Safety: A Problem-Oriented Approach to Reentry...........................27 Turning “Weeds” into “Seeds”......................................................................................31 The Revolving Door: Exploring Public Attitudes Towards Prisoner Reentry ..............34 Section III.