Historical Overview of Reentry for Exoffenders - Research Paper Example

Likewise, it cannot be viewed as an option, but it ultimately reflects the iron law of imprisonment: They all come back (Mays & Winfree, 2009). With the ever increasing number of prisoners in the U.S. Jails, and with about 600,000 prisoners leaving prison every year at an average of around 1,600 ex-convicts per day, the United States Department of Justice launched the first Reentry Partnership Initiative in 1999 (Mays & Winfree, 2009). The Reentry programming launched was structured around the principles guiding community prosecution and oriented policing.

It works on building on criminological research, which has proven that informal social controls like peer groups, family and other community social factors will ultimately have a more direct influence on an ex-convicts behavior after their release from prison as compared to the more formal social controls such as the use of probation and parole supervision (Carison, & Carrett, 2007). Reentry programming also tries to create and develop close ties and partnerships between the existing criminal justice agencies and the community groups.

Finally, it is committed to implementing only the best practices that seem to work based on the empirical research conducted. A prisoner’s reentry is generally not classified as a single event but as a process comprising of a series of several events that are spread out across a given timeline and are often interrelated and all geared towards the culmination of the release of an individual prisoner from prison into the larger free community (Mays & Winfree, 2009). The prisoner reentry process is supposed to begin immediately a prisoner is convicted and starts serving a confinement sentence at a prison facility.

The process can be subdivided into several subsequent stages. An ideal Prisoner reentry model should include four stages: These are prison-based rehabilitation, transitional services, community after –