Nearly 650,000 people are released from state and federal prison yearly and arrive on the doorsteps of communities nationwide. A far greater number reenter communities from local jails, and for many offenders and /defendants, this may occur multiple times in a year. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) over 50 percent of those released from incarceration will be in some form of legal trouble within 3 years. In his 2004 State of the Union, President Bush proposed “a four-year, $300 million prisoner re-entry initiative to expand job training and placement services, to provide transitional housing, and to help newly released prisoners get mentoring, including from faith-based groups.”
What’s
New
White House Faith-Based and Community Initiatives National Summit on Prisoner Reentry
The White House and the U.S. Departments of Labor and Justice will host the White House Faith-Based and Community Initiatives National Summit on Prisoner Reentry on November 27-28, 2007. Over the course of the two-day summit, experts and innovators in the field will explore the latest data, original research, and promising models for combating recidivism and joblessness among the formerly incarcerated. For more information, please call (202) 456-6708, send an e-mail to fbci@dtihq.com, or visit http://www.fbci.gov.
The Second Chance Act of 2007
(H.R. 1593/S. 1934)
This bill would reauthorize and revise an existing reentry program within the Department of Justice (DOJ), provide money to states for reentry programs, create a federal interagency task force to study and coordinate policy, commission a number of research projects including a study of barriers in federal policy to successful reentry, and authorize grants from DOJ directly to nonprofit organizations to provide mentoring and transitional services to adult and juvenile
offenders. The legislation is currently pending in Congress.
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