Religious volunteers have long been the silent helper in corrections institutions - lending a hand and path of faith for offenders both inside the prison and in the community after release. More recently it is the role that faith organizations play in successful reentry that has made headlines and caught the attention of lawmakers.

President George W. Bush, who announced a focus on faith-based initiatives upon coming into office, renewed his pledge to support those efforts, and re-entry, last week during his State of the Union address.

His latest proposal would make $300 million in grant money available over four years for prisoner reentry initiatives, including those involving faith-based groups.

"This year, some 600,000 inmates will be released from prison back into society. We know from long experience that if they can't find work, or a home, or help, they are much more likely to commit crime and return to prison," he said in his speech. "America is the land of second chance, and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life."

In the last several years under Bush's Faith-Based and Community Initiative, grants have been made available to federal, state and local jurisdictions to provide mentors to children with incarcerated parents, for community centers to ease the reentry process and for serious and violent offender reentry strategies.

Several other strategies have also been developed related to ex-offenders including housing programs and employment programs that intersect with faith-based groups. And, they seem to be making a difference.

The fact that these initiatives are successful is of no surprise to those who have been quietly leading faith-based initiatives in and out of prisons for a decade or more - long before they became political buzzwords.

"We have been building prisons all these years and giving people long sentences. It has exploded. Now corrections officials are looking back at what we have done over the last 15 years and are seeing it hasn't worked. Many of them see the need to have programs in prison and in the community," said Joe Williams, CEO of the Detroit-based Transition of Prisoners program.

"They've crunched the numbers and are projecting over 600,000 people will be released from prison [this year]. We can't afford to build our way out of this crisis," he added.

Williams' organization has been working with offenders since 1992 providing a connection to a faith-based community outside the prison walls and a mentoring relationship to help offenders navigate their way toward a crime-free life.

The Transition of Prisoners program is just one of many faith-based initiatives that have touched the lives of offenders and ex-offenders.

Program Success and Understanding Prisoners

TOP

Prior to President Bush's infusion of funding into faith-based initiatives, several programs were already up and running, making a difference in the lives of offenders.

With grant funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the nationally known Prison Fellowship Ministries organization established Transition of Prisoners (TOP) in 1993 as an aftercare program for prisoners within six months of release from the Michigan Department of Corrections into the Detroit area.

"We created a model for people coming out of prison because the research has shown, and it is still consistent, that people who receive services in prison, but don't receive aftercare are just as likely to go back to prison as anyone else," said Williams.

TOP primarily helps offenders reintegrate into the community through connections and mentorships with congregation members from churches in the Detroit area.

Offenders learn about TOP before they are released through the literature the program sends to area facilities. Often, offenders indicate their interest in TOP even before release.

After an assessment process, the ex-offender is matched with a congregation member from one of 80 churches representing several different denominations.

"The idea is to help them integrate into the life of a church. The more socially integrated they are, the less likely they will go back to prison. We attempt to tie them into an entire community," said Williams.

Williams knows a bit about what makes this kind of program successful - he is an ex-prisoner and knows what it takes to change your life and refocus it on helping others.

According to Williams, the critical piece for program success is understanding that these individuals need ways to connect to the community, to feel a part of it again and shake the cycle of crime.

The close ties to a mentor and a program case manager who help plan an offender's transition are important elements of making an offender feel connected.

"We help them to identify education, employment and housing resources and attend support groups and classes. We use a biblically based cognitive behavioral model and they go to group [counseling] once or twice a week. After they complete their goals they are done with the program," said Williams, who added that the average stay in TOP is eight months.

According to the evaluations that the program has done each year, the formula is working -- with a recidivism rate of about 18 percent for those who complete the program.

This type of success has prompted similar efforts elsewhere.

Amachi

The Amachi program began in Philadelphia in 2000 to work with the children of offenders and connect them with mentors from congregations in the community to help provide support they might need in their parent's absence.

According to Reverend W. Wilson Goode, creator and Director of Amachi, this type of interaction with children who have incarcerated parents is critical to ending generational crime.

"We visit local pastors and congregations and invite them to participate as a partner to alleviate the likelihood that if a child of an incarcerated parent doesn't have a mentor, then seven of 10 will end up in jails themselves," said Goode.

Goode said the children, who range in age from 5 to 15, are identified through visits to local jails, state and federal prisons where Amachi staff talk directly with the offenders, explain the mentor program and ask for contact information to help their children and caregivers on the outside.

Once the children are located and interest is solidified, then the matching process of mentor and child begins.

Over the last several years Amachi has worked closely with the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization to facilitate the matches, and in Philadelphia, the local BBBS chapter has taken over management of the program altogether.

Goode said that the match involves a careful screening including a criminal background check, a social/psychological interview and child abuse history check for the mentor volunteer and other interviews to determine interests and other factors that would best match a child on the list.

The faith-based mentoring program asks mentors to commit to mentoring a child for a minimum of one hour a week for one year, although many go well beyond that.

Goode added the program is a new way to engage community members in the lives of those in great need and make a difference in the impact a church can have on the community.

"It takes a church from club house [model] to light house, where it touches everything. My chance to work with Amachi has provided me with the opportunity to do tremendous work in terms of engaging congregation members [with the community]," said Goode.

Goode also understands the benefits first-hand.

"When I was 12 my father went to jail. If it had not been for the intervention of a local church that worked with me and taught me things, I would have been where other kids were [from my background]. It was the intervention of a local pastor that made a difference," said Goode. "Mentoring is something that works - having a loving, caring adult in the life of child can help that child tremendously."

Goode said he knows that the Amachi model, too, is making a difference both anecdotally and from evaluation.

Goode said one day, when the program first began in Philadelphia, a woman whose sons were being matched to mentors from a local church missed the bus that would take her children to meet the mentors.

"She got in her car and drove very fast on her way out there. When she was asked why do you do this?, she said 'I want my children to see there is another way to do this other than what they have seen. There are people who work every day of the week.'"

"She wanted to have her children see and experience that," Goode said.

And on the evaluation side, BBBS has found in post-match surveys that of the 700 matches made in the Philadelphia program and in cities nationwide, 65 percent of the children had improved academics, 66 percent approved attendance in school and 66 percent improved behavior in school. Additionally, more than two-thirds of the children said they were not interested in talking about drugs to others and they trusted others more.

Many lawmakers, including the President, have paid attention to the results and made funds available to these faith-based programs to bring them to even more offenders and their children.

Goode said that without the attention the President has paid to faith-based initiatives, Amachi would not have been able to expand the way it has over the last three years.

The government's faith-based initiative has also broadened the scope of faith-based efforts to address other needs of ex-offenders, including employment challenges and substance abuse treatment.

Reentry with a Faith-based Twist

According to Stanley Carlson-Theis, a fellow with the Center for Public Justice and who previously worked for the White House Faith-based and Communities Initiatives Office, people and agencies are now supporting faith-based organizations that help the "total" individual after release from prison or in general.

"If you look at the local level, a professional non-profit might tend to think about their one issue, say substance abuse for teens. But if you [consider] grass roots organizations and faith-based ones, they think about people in a different way. They see someone with a drug problem and how is it affecting other issues in the family, housing etc.," said Carlson-Theis.

That faith-based organizations already do this, means that connecting more individuals - including ex-offenders - to them through federal grants could help them better address the multiple barriers they have to successful reentry.

"[The initiative] is something that reveals the secret about human services - people are whole people. This kind of thinking is popping up all over the place - in substance abuse recovery in the community, [for example] that's all connected," said Carlson-Theis.

So then, it is no surprise that ex-offenders are not only included in grant programs under the Department of Justice's Office of faith-based initiatives, but also in ones under the Department of Labor and other departments as well.

"Part of it is we need to think about is way beyond government-delivered services to society and informal ways of helping people. And, if you unleash that across the different departments, you can look at what it means in these different departments," said Carlson-Theis.

One example is with the Department of Labor.

"Our job is to provide services and training for people to remain employed. But think about it. Who are the people who need services? The labor department says, here's [a group] of ex-offenders and they have to find a way to be established in work, but they face other huge challenges. Isn't that what the faith-based initiative is about? [To address these issues]," he said.

The answer is yes.

Finding Jobs and Mentors for Offenders

Michelle Voll of Consulting Services for Faith Based and Community Solutions has been working with the Department of Labor on a project that connects the employment needs of ex-offenders with the social needs of ex-offenders through a faith-based mentorship in their community.

Voll said the Ready for Work program specifically targets ex-offenders and links them to the workforce system and employers with the help of the faith-based community.

"The main factor for an ex-offender returning to prison is not being able to find a job. They need to work as quickly as possible and if they don't, they will fall back into old patterns of behavior," she said. "Employers are willing to give ex-offenders a second chance as long as they know there is a trustworthy organization involved, such as a faith-based organization."

The program engages volunteers from congregations in target communities to mentor offenders specifically for obtaining and retaining jobs. But the relationship between ex-offender and mentor volunteer can go so much deeper.

"The friendship and relationship that a mentor can have with an ex-offender will go a long way, more than a parole officer or an overworked caseworker. It's really the relationship and the time part of it. You need people who are committed and understand," said Voll.

Carlson-Theis said that the new thinking on the part of the White House - to address all the needs of an ex-offender through faith-based assistance -- will trickle to other agencies as well.

"My guess is that you'll see that, as a department, people will think about how [this vision] reflects on their [established] programs. If you are doing drug treatment, how does it connect to ex-offenders? And people asking, 'Should we be building more connections to these other programs?,'" Carlson-Theis said.

Carlson-Theis said by tapping into faith-based community resources programs will provide ex-offenders with the extra boost they need to stay crime-free.

"It's very unfair to say to people you've paid your debt to society and then to not help them. [Bush] is saying let's stop the penalty and help people. [Isn't that] the role of a civil society?" he said.

Resources:

White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
www.fbci.gov

Amachi - Philadelphia 215-557-4437

Center for Public Justice - http://www.cpjustice.org/

TOP - www.topinc.net/index.htm

Reentry National Media Outreach Campaign - http://reentrymediaoutreach.org