Emerging Roles and Responsibilities in the Reentry Partnership Initiative: New Ways of Doing Business

摘要

The Office of Justice Programs of the federal Department of Justice has developed a series of system-wide reentry initiatives that focus on reducing the recidivism of offenders. The initiatives include: 1) Reentry Partnership Initiatives(RPI) which includes formation of a partnership between criminal justice, social service, and community groups to develop and implement a reentry process; 2) Reentry Courts which are modified drug courts that focused on the ex-inmate; and 3) Weed and Seed-based reentry partnerships. The RPI and Reentry Courts are demonstration efforts that do not include any funding for programming; OJP has provided technical assistance to the eight RPI sites and nine Reentry Court sites. The eight RPI sites include: Baltimore, Maryland; Burlington, Vermont; Columbia, South Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Lake City, Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; Lowell, Massachusetts; and Spokane, Washington. This paper is part of a series on system efforts to address the problem of offenders returning to communities after periods of incarceration. This series is the result of a formative evaluation of the Reentry Partnership Initiative (RPI) conducted by the Bureau of Governmental Research (BGR) at the University of Maryland, College Park. The evaluation was conducted to examine how the eight demonstration sites pursued the implementation of RPI, with a focus on the organizational development across agencies to construct new offender reentry processes. BGR used qualitative research methods, including interviews, focus groups, network analysis surveys of stakeholders, and review of documents, to measure the fidelity of the implementation during the early stage of the RPI process.