... the people behind the Urban Institute research. In traditional interview format, our experts talk about the nature of their work, offer insights on what they've learned, and describe the personal goals that keep them going.

Christy Visher, a principal research associate in the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center, is the lead investigator on the multistate Returning Home project and is evaluating prisoner reentry programs in 14 states. The Returning Home study collects information on former prisoners in Maryland, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas.

Five Questions Archives

1. Why does the Urban Institute research prisoners reentering communities?

We found in the late 1990s that over a half million U.S. prisoners return home every year. (That number has since risen to about 650,000.) No one tracked them after release. So we at the Urban Institute decided to study exactly what happens when prisoners walk out that door.

The projects focus on reentry and reintegration—how do people come back into homes and into communities after they've been away for some time? Readjustment doesn't happen overnight.

We wanted to study people who are released from a state prison, not a local jail, because typically they would have been incarcerated for at least a year. As each state handles prisoner reentry differently, research is a challenge.

Several trends over the past few decades make former prisoners' lives even harder. Parole was transformed in the late 1980s/early 1990s, away from helping people connect to services and more toward surveillance and enforcement. Less than half of people placed on parole complete it successfully—that hasn't changed in 20 years.

Also in the 1990s, the public became disillusioned by poor results in rehabilitating prisoners and so put less funding into educational or treatment programs. Pell Grants, for example, were abolished for prisoners.

2. How many former prisoners find jobs and housing?

Housing and employment are critical to successful reintegration for released prisoners—90 percent of whom are men, average age of 33 years, and about half of whom nationwide are African American.

What we've found from talking to former prisoners a few months after release is that about 40 percent go to live with their mothers or stepmothers. Very few are homeless initially, but that's not to say that their housing is stable.

Many tell us that they would like to live somewhere else in six months or a year. The problem is that getting an apartment requires a substantial amount of money. Few people coming out of prison have enough.

City housing departments can exclude people with drug convictions or other felony convictions. This poses some serious problems in urban areas such as Chicago, where people are coming back to families who live in public housing.

Getting jobs is hard for most people coming out of prison. Prisons are not very helpful, so the majority of released prisoners don't have any identification, and it's not easy to get the proper paperwork done quickly.

Some former prisoners are not even being monitored. One out of five people that come out of prison have no supervision. Their sentences expire and that's it. Sometimes people are released from solitary confinement directly to the street.

There are other hurdles. Fewer than half have a high school diploma or a GED. Most introductory jobs require those basic educational credentials. Returning prisoners go to work in construction and other kinds of day labor jobs, but not to permanent jobs with a paycheck and some benefits.

Whether these people can get employment varies by city. For example, in Chicago, when we talked to people about two months after they had been released, only one in five had done any work. In Houston, it was double that—about 40 percent. Cleveland was somewhere in between.

In a multistate study, we found that two-thirds had done some work within three months, but only a third were working consistently. So getting jobs for this population is very difficult. Employers don't want to hire ex-felons, and no law stops them from refusing to hire an ex-convict.

There are no prison-to-work incentives, as there are for welfare-to-work. Researchers and advocates have tried to push the parallel, but it has been slow to catch on. Welfare mothers are a much safer population than ex felons.

The climate is starting to change, slowly. Illinois, for example, has submitted a bill to ban discrimination on the basis of a criminal record, if that criminal past would not affect the applicant's ability to perform at the specific job.

3. What are the health-related challenges to returning home?

The most serious is illegal substance use. Over half of former prisoners have histories of illegal substance use, primarily marijuana or cocaine, but in some cities, heroin. Heavy alcohol use is also a problem.

The type of drug varies by city. In Baltimore, we found that over 40 percent had a daily heroin addiction. In other cities, cocaine or even methamphetamine might be the problem. Prisoners with heavy drug habits before they were incarcerated can relapse easily once back on the street, especially without substance abuse treatment while in prison.

Substance abuse treatment in prison is limited—probably 20 to 25 percent who need it, get it. Services are expensive and state budgets can't afford this kind of programming. However, research shows that it is a cost effective approach to reducing recidivism.

Prisoners are the only population with a constitutional right to health care. So prisoners with serious mental or physical health needs are getting medication while they're in prison. But that constitutional right expires when they leave prison. They're generally released with a 30-day supply of their medication. After that, few have the money to pay for it.

For some illnesses—especially mental—not taking your medicine regularly can unleash a host of other problems within months, including depression and substance-use relapse, and perhaps a return to criminal activity and recidivism.

Better linkages between the prison health care system and the community health care system are needed to help people who have physical and mental health problems move back into the community. Otherwise, they're given a list of health centers and that's it. No one has their records and they basically have to start from scratch.

Some states are better than others at transferring released prisoners' records. In some states, an initial medical appointment is set up in the first 30 days. The problem is many former prisoners don't show up for those appointments.

Some state prison systems are moving toward using life coaches, people who are there when the prisoners walk out the door, to help them navigate obstacles in those first few months, including making medical appointments, getting their identification, finding a stable place to live, obtaining transportation vouchers, and that kind of thing. Of course, such help is expensive, so some cities are experimenting with enlisting volunteers.

4. Does family and community support make a difference?

Our initial research found scant attention paid to the family's role, so we wanted to make it a central component of our study. And what we've found is that people coming out of prison are relying heavily on their families, for both emotional and tangible support.

Three-quarters of those we talked to say family had been an important factor in staying out of prison. People who have more family support are more likely to be employed, more likely to stay off drugs, and more likely to stay out of prison.

Families are nested in communities—another mostly overlooked fact. We are finding that the community is very important in the lives of people getting out of prison.

Many prisoners settled into different neighborhoods because they didn't want to be back in their old neighborhoods. But it turns out that the new neighborhoods aren't that much better than the old neighborhoods.

That said, those going back to relatively safe neighborhoods—where drugs aren't everywhere and the crime rate is relatively low—are working more weeks after release, are less likely to use drugs, and are less likely to wind up back in prison.

5. What innovative strategies are evolving to address the problems of prisoner reentry?

Some states in the last five or six years have started to think hard about this issue and develop new strategies to help people coming out of prison. One emerging approach is linking services received inside prison to services received outside prison—a continuity of service, whether health care, drug treatment, education, or job training. There, the challenge is linking bureaucracies that haven't typically worked together before.

In some states, the role of parole officer is beginning to be redefined from law enforcement agent into someone who can link people to services and other community resources. That's happening very slowly because parole officers in this country are law enforcers—in some states, they're licensed to carry guns.

Using community mentors is exciting, though it hasn't been evaluated. There is a history in the substance abuse field of using former addicts to help people make the transition from addict to nonaddict. That model is starting to be used with former prisoners.

Many people are nervous about these mentors who have been in prison themselves. Many prisons won't allow former prisoners back into the prisons, even to help others get started in the release process. Still, we see promise in this approach.

People out of prison who want to take a different path deserve the chance. They deserve jobs, adequate housing, and health care, just like everyone else. Some of the negative stigma in the community may slowly be eroding with all the recent conversation around reentry. But we have a long way to go.