A Vision of Healing, and Hope, for Formerly Incarcerated Women

Connecticut is attempting to reduce prison recidivism by changing parole practices. Changes to the system are allowing parole officers to foster relationships with parolees and counsel them as people, not as cases.

A Rotary club in Topeka, Kansas, has transformed reentry support for incarcerated women at the Shawnee County Jail through Intersection to Care, a program that pairs immediate-release support with mentorship, skills classes, and subsidized housing. The program, led by women with lived experience of incarceration, meets women at the jail exit to prevent trafficking, connects them to recovery housing through Oxford House of Kansas, and offers technology, health, art, and movement classes inside the facility. Since launching in 2022, the initiative has assisted more than 1,000 women.

Impact Justice’s Homecoming Project helps formerly incarcerated individuals secure housing by pairing them with homeowners renting out a spare bedroom or studio space in their homes. Impact Justice pays the homeowner for six months, providing the formerly incarcerated participant with enough time to rebuild and acclimate to life outside of prison without the burden of paying rent. The Homecoming Project is meant to be an alternative to transitional housing that can sabotage the formerly incarcerated person’s independence.

Women around the world are coming together to form “mommunes,” which are communes for single mothers to live under the same roof and share the load of child care, bills and housework. There are even platforms, like CoAbode, which have emerged to make finding other single mothers to live with much easier. CoAbode alone has had about 300,000 single mothers create profiles on the platform to find a home-share match.

Transitional housing centers like Huma-Faith and Halal House provide accommodations for formerly incarcerated people, specifically Muslim men. These houses are safe spaces that provide necessary resources like a shower and a warm bed, as well as work opportunities, group talk sessions, and regular drug and alcohol screening to help people put their best selves forward. These houses are also Muslim-centric, meaning people can rebuild their lives while freely practicing their religion.

The Georgia House provides women in Avon, Ohio, a free place to live and recover from alcohol and drug addictions. Women in the house participate in a daily structure that includes time at treatment centers and group devotionals.

Benevolence Farm provides reentry services for women to help ease the transition after incarceration. The nonprofit provides free room and board, a guaranteed job, career counseling, health appointments, and transportation.

Compass House provides safety and support for women, many of them newly released from incarceration, who struggle with substance misuse issues or mental illness. The transitional housing program is the first of its kind in a state that is sorely lacking in such services. Peer support and professional counseling and treatment can last a year or more. The women in the program, who are at high risk of homelessness without a refuge like Compass House, pay 30% of their income for rent, with the rest of the costs covered by a state agency.

The Fulton Community Supervision Center in Missouri provides trauma-informed, gender-specific care and services to women who face the risk of recidivism. Participants live at the center, where they receive services like cognitive behavioral therapy and classes that teach coping mechanisms and personal and professional development. Core to much of the programming is helping women find their self worth.

In order to counter terrorism and reduce recidivism of incarcerated male jihadists', the Entrepreneurship and Proselytization Empowerment Program helps the wives of jailed extremists through counseling and lessons about entrepreneurship. The program can help these families stay afloat and decrease the appeal of extremism for their husbands upon release.