Community Corections to Prison reentry

Abstract

In this paper I have highlighted the significant points relating to the concept of Prisoner's Reentry. Prisoner reentry involves all the activities and programs involved in helping former inmates integrate back into their communities and become productive members of society. For understanding this topic in depth, I have conducted research on various articles and based on that I have compiled the annotated bibliography. When inmates are sentenced and serve time behind bars they have a lot of time on their hands. This time can be used to improve the inmate, or not. While in prison, if available, inmates can participate in various recidivism reducing treatment programs. This include but are not limited to anger management, drug treatment, education and vocation training, sex offender relapse prevention, to name a few. This paper also highlights the Recidivism of female offenders as there number under the jurisdiction of state and federal correctional authorities has increased dramatically in the past several decades. Moreover, this paper also highlighted the three phases of prison reentry and significance of application of constitutive model of communication, it is a constitutive approach to communication as it claims that social realities emerge based on the context and quality of interactions; they are not reducible to individual actors or actions.

Community Corections to Prison reentry

Introduction

Prisoner reentry is a prevalent topic in contemporary discussions of criminal justice and public safety in the United States. Prisoner reentry involves all the activities and programs involved in helping former inmates integrate back into their communities and become productive members of society. Interest in reentry efforts continues to grow as the costs of recidivism and incarceration take increasing tolls on city and state budgets, and the effects of criminal activity are felt by families and local communities. In 2008 the Federal Government brought much-needed attention and support to the issue of prisoner reentry with the passage of the Second Chance Act, which authorized $165 million in grants to support reentry programs, and created a national reentry resource center to provide training and disseminate best practices. Across the political spectrum there is widespread agreement that prisoner reentry is one of the main criminal justice challenges confronting the United States (Rotter & Carr, 2011).

Discussion

Prisoner reentry receives extensive attention from both academics and practitioners, and the details of previous studies and reports are well-known. . Despite the diversity of stakeholders involved in the issue of prisoner reentry, there is surprising consensus about the basic storyline shaping today's reentry context. Beginning in the 1970s our criminal justice system experienced major philosophical shifts away from the ideals of rehabilitation to more punitive approaches to crime centered on incarceration. Much of this was motivated by the “nothing works” approach to criminal justice that arose in response to Robert Martisnon's (1974) research on prison reform (Wetzel et.al, 2012). Other research at the time, such as James Q. Wilson's (1975) book Thinking About Crime, fueled the emerging “tough on crime” movement that would define criminal justice policies throughout the 1980s and ...