How Former Prisoners are Set up to Fail, Especially if They're Women

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.

Crossroads for Women, a New Mexico nonprofit, is helping formerly incarcerated women find community, support, and recovery. Using trauma-informed care practices, the program offers a comprehensive list of services like housing, mental health treatment, employment counseling, and substance abuse treatment. Underlying all services is the understanding that no individual is trauma free and that community and relationships are crucial to sustainable recovery.

In rural North Dakota where clinical treatment centers are hard to find, a program called Free Through Recovery "seeks to drive down North Dakota’s prison rates by creating networks of sobriety and support around people on probation and parole." Although local law enforcement claims the program is not an alternative to incarceration, in the short time it has been in operation, it has served over 550 people with many participants securing both housing and work opportunities.

For Redina, and others suffering from addiction, it is hard to break the cycle. 'Women Working for a Change' is a program that tries to change addicts' thinking in order to prevent a relapse.

If juveniles in the Hinds County youth-court system, whose families tend to have limited resources, cannot get sustained, meaningful help at the center, they do not have many other options. But, thanks to a lawsuit on behalf of the juveniles in the facility, the county is starting to address the lack of mental-health services - whether in facilities or starting at home with the family.

Mississippians who receive earned probation for crimes that do not carry a death sentence or involve deadly weapons will now have access to high-school equivalency education, alcohol and drug counseling, re-entry and employment services—and perhaps, most importantly, "Thinking for a Change," an evidence-based cognitive behavioral-therapy program.

Led by peers and providing everything from group therapy to tips on how to build credit, the Timelist program works with the recently paroled as well as the presently incarcerated to reduce recidivism. Seven years after it started, Timelist’s comprehensive approach has a perfect record of it’s graduates staying out of prison.

For 20 years, the Center for Young Women’s Development has been a safe space for thousands of young women ages 16 to 24 who have been incarcerated or are homeless in the San Francisco Bay Area. The center is most recognized for its strategies to give these women opportunities for personal and professional growth.

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.

Therapeutic courts like the Anchorage Wellness Court were born out of a desire to reduce recidivism rates and deflate ballooning prison populations. For many, they have become the answer to breaking the cycle of criminal behavior while treating people with substance abuse issues.