| Concentrating on Reentry Yields Results
Ft. Wayne's seeding efforts involve providing job development
services, among other services. |
There is a lot of talk these days about recidivism and how
communities must focus on working with returning offenders.
Such issues are a top priority for CCDO, and in Fort Wayne,
IN, the Weed and Seed site has decided to truly focus on reentry.
The Fort Wayne/Allen County Weed and Seed effort represents
a unique and successful design. It has changed the traditional
understanding of a Weed and Seed site and become a model for
a "special emphasis" site; that is, a site that
concentrates its efforts on one issue or population and applies
the Weed and Seed approach to focus on crime reduction in a
specific high-crime area, use existing resources, and involve
community residents and decisionmakers.
For Fort Wayne members, that meant examining their most serious
crime problem and discovering that it originates from offenders
who return to the community from prison, jail, and other confinement
facilities. So law enforcement and community service organizations
spent a year designing a reentry program. Involving community
service providers across a wide spectrum of service provision—including
labor, health, and education—as well as key decisionmakers
allowed Fort Wayne to fully address the reentry issue. Participants
understood that they owned a part of the problem, and that
they had the resources to solve it.
"The reason why we're so successful is because
everyone has a piece of the pie," said Sheila Hudson,
Executive Director of Allen County Community Corrections.
Hudson, who directs all supervision, monitoring, and intervention
programs for returning offenders, freely admits she used to
deal with offenders in a narrow way, but now she looks at the
issue of reentry differently. She understands the returning
offender's need for community support and involves many
community service organizations to provide it.
"I've had one goal—to keep the public safe," she
said. "But I could not do it alone, I had to branch out."
The Fort Wayne site focuses exclusively on offenders returning
from prison to the southeast quadrant of the city, an area
of approximately 50,000 people. It has for years been considered
responsible for significant and sustained serious and violent
crime in the city, a large percentage of which is committed
by returning offenders.
The weeding portion of the program involves an array of control
or law enforcement functions. It includes the police, judiciary,
and local and state corrections systems (e.g., Allen County
Community Correction Center, Indiana Department of Corrections,
Allen County Superior Court, City of Fort Wayne Police Department).
The control activities involve—
- Immediate processing and housing of returning offenders.
- Individual assessments that evaluate the offender's
risk to the community and the offender's strengths
and weaknesses in education, employment and housing needs,
mental health and other health care needs, substance abuse,
criminal history, and community/familial support networks.
- A corresponding reentry plan that addresses each of the
assessed issues.
- Electronic monitoring.
- Offender management and oversight by community corrections,
parole, and local law enforcement personnel.
- Provision of support services in a secure setting.
- Regular judicial review by the reentry court judge of the
returning offenders' compliance with their official
reentry plans.
The support services, or seeding functions, involve providing
transitional programs, remedial education, employment readiness
and job development services, mental health and other health
care services, substance abuse treatment, housing, and help
in developing support systems that may involve family and/or
faith-based and other neighborhood organizations.
Some of these services are provided by the existing human
service systems in the community; most are provided at the
Community Corrections Center, particularly following initial
release. Having all the services in the center, Hudson explained,
is more convenient and provides a safe environment for the
employees where there is no stigma attached for the offenders
or potential employers, as there might be with onsite meetings.
Already, Fort Wayne has seen a significant reduction in recidivism:
the percentage of individuals who participated in the program
for more than 2 years and were rearrested within 1 year of
release was reduced from 45 percent to 22.5 percent. Another
evaluation showed the financial benefit of the program. The
evaluation estimated a savings to the community of nearly $2
million when comparing the number of crimes committed by participants
in the program to the crimes the participants would have been
expected to commit had they not been in the program. In addition,
the target neighborhood experienced a 13.5-percent reduction
in crime.
Initially the program was something of a hard sell politically,
but once the statistics clearly showed the returning offenders' impact
on crime rates, the police department was on board and others
followed. Today, the program is recognized as a national model
reentry effort by the Office of Justice Programs and has influenced
the design and implementation of the Serious and Violent Offender
Reentry Initiative. The Fort Wayne program also was recognized
by the U.S. Attorney General and given a financial award to
support its efforts. The Indiana Department of Corrections
recognized it as a model for reentry services that the department
intends to promote throughout the state.
In the future, CCDO envisions developing a limited number
of other single-focus sites to address similar social problems
that are common to many Weed and Seed sites (e.g., school truancy
and dropouts, unemployment, inadequate housing, teen pregnancy,
substance abuse, gang violence, economic underdevelopment).
Fort Wayne would serve as a training and technical assistance
provider to other Weed and Seed communities that want to replicate
its innovative reentry strategy.
For further information, contact:
Sheila Hudson
Executive Director of Allen County Community
Corrections
260-449-4578
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