Referred to as the revolving door - jails can quickly churn offenders out onto the street after relatively short stays behind bars. But despite the brief time period they have to work with, jails are providing offenders with meaningful connections to increase their chances of success after release.

Partnerships in the community and with other local agencies are how some officials are making this happen and they are seeing, and hoping for, positive results.

"We in jails are starting to look at the fact that we can't do it on our own; we need to network. It's been a great move [in this direction], but not a global transition; it is [often] regional," said Shelly Morelock, Corrections Program Specialist with the National Institute of Corrections.

Morelock is involved in the NIC's effort to assist corrections agencies and administrators with offender job training and said it is something that more and more small and medium-sized jails are looking for. But offender job training and connections to potential employment is only one area that collaborations and partnerships have emerged in.

Many agencies are also seeking and finding collaborations to address mental health issues among offenders and to create life skills programming for them before they are released.

According to Mary Ellen Mastrorilli, Superintendent of Community Corrections for the Suffolk County, Mass., Sheriff's Department, one of the tricks to making these partnerships happen is coming to the joint realization that multiple agencies tend to serve the same population.

"When I look at different agencies we all have our own values and mission. What I try to do by bringing in the partners is very much build the bridge. We all agree in one form or another that we are working with this population. It's my role to facilitate the transition from incarceration to release. We're trying to reduce duplication of effort," she said.

The Suffolk County Sheriff's Department, along with other partners in the Boston community, was the recent recipient of a federal Department of Education (DOE) grant that will allow for the development of life skills and other training for female offenders.

It is through funding and grants like these that corrections agencies have been able to bring their ideas about partnership through to fruition.

Life Skills and Reentry Preparation

According to Mastrorilli, she and a colleague who heads a Boston-based non-profit that provides job training, work experience and other services to homeless individuals teamed up to apply for the grant to help female offenders get back on their feet prior to release.

"We had thought about the fact that my inmates are her clients. We saw this RFP for life skills programming for prisoners and we thought it could be our perfect opportunity to do a joint project," said Mastrorilli.

Their hunch proved to be right on when, last October, their proposal for the Community Re-Entry for Women (CREW) program was awarded a $350,000 grant over three years to provide life skills and education to female prisoners within the Suffolk County House of Correction.

Mastrorilli said that female offenders became the focus because they are an often-underserved population, yet they are usually the primary care givers and care takers of their children and tend to have more health problems than their male counterparts.

"We did a reentry program that starts behind the walls where they will get life skills, job preparation training and educational services. Then we wanted to do medical discharge planning," she said.

To accomplish the discharge planning for the CREW program, the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department approached the South End Community Health Center located in Boston to provide medical and mental health discharge planning.

The program, although still in development, will operate on a case management model that will help the offenders make connections for after release. The medical and mental health services will be coordinated by the discharge planner from the community health center, Mastrorilli said.

"The case management is critical. They have such conflict in their lives and they need resources and don't know how to access them," she said.

Mastrorilli said that the program will target women offenders with children, who have poor work histories and substance abuse histories and will help them be better prepared to navigate the social service and educational systems in the community. CREW hopes to serve 50 women a year.

Although the grant limits the program to providing services to prisoners only, program organizers hope that the relationships developed will be so strong that post release the offender will want to maintain them in the community post release.

In addition, said Mastrorilli, the sheriff's department operates a 15-bed halfway house in the city that these offenders can access while in pre-release status.

The ultimate goal is that the program will make enough of a difference that the department will be able to take on funding for it when the grant has expired.

Officials at the Lackawanna County Prison in Scranton, Pennsylvania were also able to capitalize on federal education funds for offenders and expand a program that had already been serving female offenders for several years.

According to Tim Betti, Director of Clinical Services for the prison, the Stepping Up Life Skills program has provided a variety of services to female offenders including parenting classes, literacy classes, job and life skills as well as drug and alcohol treatment through staff from the local Equal Opportunity and Training Center.

According to Betti, the classes range from basic math, where offenders learn to use a calculator, to a computer lab where they learn to write a resume.

In addition, the program involves coordinated child visits with their incarcerated parent and visits and meetings with the outside care givers of those children. The $322,000 DOE grant allows the prison and EOTC to take the program further.

"This grant takes the Stepping Up program and allows us to increase the services. This grant will allow us to include about 50 percent of the population," said Betti

The primary beneficiaries of that expansion are the male offenders at the prison.
Betti said that a unit of serious offenders has already become involved in the program and it has had a marked effect on their behavior.

"Staff was concerned about what the behavior might be, but it has been fantastic. They get certificates for all of it; it gets them off the block. And, the ultimate goal is that they might have a different life after release," Betti said.

Also, by connecting with the EOTC in the community, the offenders can also take advantage of an open-door policy after release for additional services, Betti added.

"I'm looking forward to how this is going to develop," he said.

Corrections officials across the country are also hopeful that a slew of new corrections-mental health collaborations will have a similar, positive effect on the offender population.

Funding Promotes Mental Health Partnerships

In Orange County, Florida, for example, corrections officials recently received funds from a joint Council of State Governments/National Institute of Corrections project to provide technical assistance for programs serving offenders with mental health problems.

Jill Hobbs, Manager of Community Corrections for the Orange County Corrections Department, said that the department wanted to build on a jail diversion program that involved the county's only community mental health agency.

Hobbs explained that the jail has contracted with the agency, the Lakeside Alternatives, for a number of services over the years including jail diversion, which provides inpatient and residential beds and case management for certain offenders with mental health problems.

When the funding opportunity arose, jail, community mental health and county leaders sat down to look over the diversion program and decided that it could use some streamlining.

"We needed to encourage all the partners to work together and share resources - so we were asking people to come in and give us some guidance," said Hobbs.

With its new technical assistance funding the partnership will try to better map existing mental health services in the jail to the services in the community.

"A mentally ill person touches the criminal justice system in several ways. We have the opportunity to divert them, but if they get in, how do we get them to the state hospital, for example? There are a lot of paths that they can take and interventions that could occur to make sure they have good follow-up in the community," she said.

Hobbs added that the grant funding will also help the corrections department and its partners tweak its existing program to get the mentally ill better services quicker.

She said that the average length of stay statistics for mentally ill individuals in the jail speaks to the problem.

The average length of time between when an inmate has been declared incompetent to proceed and actually going to a state facility is 86 days. Within those 86 days, there is an average wait time of 40 days between the receipt of the commitment packet and the actual transfer to Department of Children and Families custody.

By reducing that time not only will the individuals be served better, but also the county will realize cost savings as the number of bed days is reduced.

"We're trying to identify where there are gaps in services, prioritize those and see where funding can be shifted or make a stronger case for getting more funding. We also hope that when the consultant comes in, they could see different ways to make the system more effective," Hobbs said.

Interestingly, just after the program received this new funding, its partner, Lakeside, also announced it had received state funding to focus on competency restoration of the mentally ill in the community. Hobbs hopes that the combination of efforts will result in a better program and system to serve the mentally ill population.

Also, thanks to the CSG/NIC funding, a new collaboration is underway in the Philadelphia Prison System with its mental health service provider.

According to Harriett Spencer, Executive Director for External Affairs and Research and Development for the Philadelphia Prison System, this new collaboration should help improve the chances offenders have of succeeding in the community.

"About 1,600 [of our] offenders have been diagnosed with some form of mental illness. They are repeat offenders and they contribute to the rise in recidivism. [But] we also recognize that they have a lot of difficulty transitioning back into the community. Many of them lack housing, vocational or educational opportunities and they need treatment," said Spencer. "We decided to work alongside the mental health association and see what we could do."

With the support of the corrections commissioner, Spencer said the partnership between the prison system and Philadelphia Behavioral Health Services was born.

Spencer said the two organizations sat down to discuss developing a program in light of the funding available through CSG/NIC. Both parties shared what they were doing for this population, from in-patient and out-patient programs to drug treatment, and learned that there was a gap that needed to be bridged.

"What we did separate and apart was not enough. The mental health community realized they needed to be inside the jails working with this group rather than waiting for release," said Spencer.

Some of the areas that needed to be covered in transition included connecting offenders to medical services, accessing prescription medications, and making appointments with the community mental health system.

As the partnership blossoms, the two parties are working on enhancing computer systems so that the two groups can share data more easily, instituting a regular presence of mental health professionals inside the prison and creating more pre-release planning.

"Our ultimate goal is to reduce recidivism and give this population the help they need and help them stay out of jail," said Spencer. "If we cannot provide all the services, we want to identify the resources in the community."

This attitude of sharing and connecting with community resources is also being embraced by jails in another way - for inmate employment and job training.

A Combined Approach to Inmate Job Training

Bolstered by trainings from the NIC's Office of Correctional Job Training and Placement, several county jails are working with multiple agencies to better prepare offenders for entering the workforce after release.

According to NIC's Morelock, in the last few years jails and sheriffs' departments have made a particular point to attend training at the NIC for Offender Workforce Development. Embedded in the training program is a requirement that the participants form a team that can include representatives from the jail, treatment and employment.

The program provides participants with skills and competencies to educate others to train offenders on hard and soft employment skills, career planning, job searches and identify barriers that offenders may face in locating work.

"They [the teams] are given a lot of assignments on how to work together in their system. In one week they are taught how to develop an action plan and they are expected to train their colleagues and figure out who else needs to be part of their network and to call potential referral sources," said Morelock.

Sheriff's departments such as Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, have attended the trainings with representatives from the community to better prepare inmates for finding employment.

According to Carmen Hubert, Work Release Coordinator for the Work Release and Restitution Center of the Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Office, the training helped participants work better together and provide even more services to offenders.

Hubert said representatives from the work release center, community corrections, an organization called Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime and the Employment Security Commission all attended the training.

"The training brought us together and made it known that all of us are connected in some way; we are seeing a lot of the same folks," she said.

Hubert said the training also opened more doors for offender referrals for assistance in obtaining employment. For example, other community groups can now provide offenders with interview clothing or tools they might need for a specific job.

"We felt more connected and, actually we were doing the job before we took the training, [but] now we are now able to do it better and we are better skilled and have more tools to work with offenders," Hubert said.

It is those kinds of results that jails and sheriff's departments hope to experience as they become more creative in how they work with offenders - whether it is mental health treatment or job preparation - and create a connection with the community into which those offenders will return.

Resources:

Suffolk County CREW program -  http://www.scsdma.org/

NIC Offender Job Training program -  http://www.nicic.org/OCJTP/

Orange County Corrections Department http://orangecountyfl.net/dept/correct/default.htm