• Assess The Benefits Of Rehabilitation To The Community

Many offenders who are released from prison encounter many obstacles which hinder their progress towards community re-entry. On their own, many fail to secure employment, housing, or complete education or training programs. Without guidance or assistance many offenders return to crime to support themselves. Fortunately there are number of organizations that see the need for services to assist offenders on their path back into the community. One such organization that has proven to be successful is the Safer Foundation.

Community corrections is continually changing and has been for the past one hundred years. From the early to mid-twentieth century onward it has used three major models, the medical model, community model, and the crime control model. The major turning point for the American community corrections system that led to corrections as we know it today was in 1974 when What Works? - Questions and Answers About Prison Reform by Martinson was published. The system changed practically overnight across the nation. The notion of rehabilitating offenders was dismissed and a more punitive “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality took over. Presently the corrections system is still working in the crime control model, but professionals are trying to restructure how we deal with criminal offenders during and after incarceration. The difficulty in the restructuring is finding the balance between punishing criminal offenders proportionate to their crime, but also rehabilitating them to be productive members of society once they are released so that they do not recidivate.

On September 26, 1973, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was put into place to replace the Vocational Rehabilitation Act. The population that benefitted the most from this act were the people who lived with disabilities. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 developed, revised and implemented many plans for the disabled population. A few of the plans that were carried out with this act were the assistance of constructing and improve rehabilitation facilities, gauging the rehabilitation potential of individuals with a disability, promoting and expanding employment opportunities for individual with disabilities and more (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, n.d.). In 2001, a bill was introduced to the Senate by Senator Thurmond Strom (R-SC) that proposed to exclude prisoners from receiving the benefits of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (S.33—107th Congress, 2001).

Once the offender is released from prison with still no understanding of how to re enter society they resort back to what they know. However, some state and federal facilities are offering rehabilitation programs within the prison systems. Some federal prisons offer GED programs, college classes, and apprenticeships. There are also many of prisons who offer drug classes such as nonresidential drug abuse programs as well as the drug education class, 500 hr residential drug program. Some also offer classes that will get an inmate mentally ready before they release. In the state prisons they offer college classes in some as well as apprenticeships, and a drug class. What I have seen is that federal prisons are still offering a good bit of programs threw the poor economy while the state is cutting programs from left to right. I witnessed this statistic in person January 2010,21 inmates at Greenville Federal Prison Camp completed a 500-hr residential treatment program out of 21 inmates who was released in the same three days only one has returned back to prison to this exact day. However the first three years out for an

Corrections are an important part of the criminal justice system and they work in concert with law enforcement and the courts. Citizens in the United States expect criminals to be monitored, with some in secured facilities, so they will not fear of becoming continual victim of crime. To illustrate this expectation further, there are 2.5 million individuals on probation or parole and 1 million individuals in jails or prisons (Morris & Tonry, 2013, p. 370). However, does every individual confined in jails and prisons still need to be there or is there a better way to deal with certain special prison populations? Due to the large number of prisoners within the correctional system, certain special populations of inmates do not receive the rehabilitation or care needed to successfully reintegrate back into society. Additionally, these special populations create an undue burden on the correctional system in terms of financial costs associated with their confinement. There are changes that can be made to the criminal justice system to accommodate special populations of inmates. This paper will explore the alternative

Given grim post-release arrest rates, it’s hard to understand why our government is not doing more to help those transitioning from incarceration to life on the outside. It doesn’t make sense for taxpayer dollars to go towards incarcerating people over and over – it seems that the money could be better spent improving rehabilitation programs for inmates. Increased funding for programs aimed at helping former inmates transition to life on the outside would likely lead to better outcomes for those individuals, fewer crimes being committed, and lower recidivism rates. One would hope that our society would want to see people who are incarcerated serve their time, get rehabilitated, get released, and become productive members of their communities.

To wit, there are easily over 700,000 offenders released from state or Federal prisons. A disappointing factor, another nine million cycle throughout local jails and another 10,000 of these offenders are released back into the communities (Caporizzo, 2011). Nevertheless, more than 650,00 of those newly released offenders will be more than likely to re-offended and return back into the confined setting in which, they were once released from less than three weeks to three years of their release.

The prison population in the United States has been growing steadily for more over 30 years, a great portion of this population are returned offenders. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports, each year more than 650,000 offenders are released into communities with at least 5 million of the ex-offenders being under some form of community-based supervision (James, 2010). In an attempt to curtail the rate of recidivism, the Bureau of Prison contracts with Residential Reentry Centers (RRCs) to assist inmates approaching release. RRC’s provide safe, structured, supervised environment, as well as employment counseling, job placement and financial management assistance (Prisons, 2017).

Until as recently as the 1970s, the focus of criminal justice professionals revolved around rehabilitation of offenders (Cullen & Jonson, 2012, p. 27). Dating back to when the first American penitentiary was constructed in 1820, the idea was that by creating a system that mimicked the concept of a well-developed, law-abiding community within the prison atmosphere,

In order to enjoy easier transition from prison to the community, many ex-offenders live in neighborhood-based residential facilities called halfway houses. Many advocate halfway houses to those newly released from prisons because these facilities offer various kinds of services to help lower the risk of their relapse or recidivism (Halfway House). Mr. Douglas Hollis, a 55-year-old man convicted at the age of 16 for a Second Degree Murder, is also expected to live in

About ninety-three percent of all people incarcerated are released eventually. Within three years, seventy percent of those released will be rearrested. states that inmates fail to successfully reenter society because of mental health issues, substance abuse, past criminal acts, total education level, economic standing, among other things. One an inmate is out they should have been rehabilitated in every way possible. They should be ready to enter a world that has evolved with no mercy towards them. Reentry in communities are determined by the amount of opportunity offered by the community itself. For example, the obtainability of housing, drug abuse treatment programs, health services, schooling and hiring opportunities are crucial for integration. One of the

A large number of incarcerated people leave the state and federal prisons every year. It becomes a major concern for federal, local, and state government when they reenter into the community. Most of these individuals do not fit into the community and after a short period of time, some of them would have committed new crimes or have violated terms in which they were released and thus re-incarcerated. This issue brings about many

Just as the number of people in prison grows, so too does the number of people leaving prison. Research shows that 95 percent of all prisoners in the United States are released at some point (Katel 2009). The Department of Justice reports that more than 600,000 prisoners are released each year (John Oliver 2015). This means that hundreds of thousands of people reenter society and are expected to have learned from their time behind bars. Unfortunately, most of these people released back into society are not properly prepared. As a result, they end up back in prison.

Roughly, two thirds of released prisoners are rearrested within three years of release, 47% were reconvicted, and 41% were re-incarcerated (National Center for Policy Analysis, 1998). Those are just the ones who get caught. If you return an individual to the community with $10 and a suit of clothes and no support systems, you can just about guarantee that that person is going to resort to some kind of criminal behavior. Because these numbers are so disproportionately high, we have to think in terms of doing something drastic with these offenders before they are released back into society. If no constructive plan of action can be formulated, invariably our society will falter at the hands of these men and

Over many years there has been great debate about whether rehabilitation reduces the rate of recidivism in criminal offenders. There has been great controversy over whether anything works to reduce recidivism and great hope that rehabilitation would offer a reduction in those rates. In this paper I will introduce information and views on the reality of whether rehabilitation does indeed reduce recidivism. Proposed is a quasi-experiment, using a group of offenders that received rehabilitation services and an ex post facto group that did not? I intend to prove that rehabilitation services do