You'd think serving one prison sentence in a lifetime would be enough to motivate any person to avoid it at all costs. But still, a hefty percentage of inmates released on parole end up back in prison over and over again.

These are "the churners, the people that keep coming back to prison time after time," said Kathy Gnall, the director of planning, research, statistics and grants for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

"Since '97 there's been a 67 percent increase in technical violators [of parole]," Gnall said of those who might not necessarily have committed a crime, but broke a rule like leaving the city to which they were assigned.

But, recently, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has taken aggressive steps to combat the growing problem of parolee recidivism. The goal is to "make a dent in the churners," Gnall said.

Returning offenders have led to prison overpopulation across the country and in Pennsylvania, where one third of those serving prison time are parole violators.

To combat this problem the Pennsylvania DOC has begun to focus on this population to alleviate the overcrowding.

"If we can't attack the front door, the other thing we can do is attack the back door," Gnall said.

The Pennsylvania DOC is exhaustively researching ways to improve their re-entry program-called Community Orientation and Reintegration or COR-that prepares parolees for their release into the real world. And they are using new statistics to develop programs to target charged parole violators and to continue to provide education and advice to parolees living on their own.

Re-entry Programming

Mike Kazor, the director of the Bureau of Inmate Services at the Pennsylvania DOC, and the one who oversees COR, said the program is "basically everything that is necessary for them to be able to function in society."

He said inmates in the program undergo a week of "employability training," where they get help with resumes and interviewing. They use filmed role-playing exercises so inmates can easily evaluate their performance in a real-life interview setting.

Then, before they are released to a community correctional facility, or halfway house, they participate in a week dedicated to reviewing other issues they may face when readjusting to life on the outside, Kazor said.

During this week they'll re-learn skills that are crucial to rebuilding a normal life, like managing money or finding quality housing. "Employment and housing are very, very big issues that we are looking at," Kazor said.

But Pennsylvania's re-entry program goes beyond just finding a place to live.

"They can find work and they can find homes, but the difficulty is the quality," said Paul O'Connor, the Pennsylvania DOC's director of the bureau of community corrections, which includes the state's halfway houses. "The most successful people that I see are people that start at one level and progress to another level."

While the COR program tries to provide the training for parolees to successfully adjust to life outside of prison, the transition is still difficult. And, many end up violating their parole.

A recent study done by the Pennsylvania DOC's office of planning, research, statistics and grants suggests that the three greatest factors contributing to parolee recidivism are antisocial attitudes, poor coping and problem solving skills and unrealistic expectations about life outside of prison, said Bret Bucklen, a research and evaluation analyst who worked on the study. The study surveyed 550 parole violators in Pennsylvania prisons about the difficulties they had adjusting to life outside of prisons and about the reasons they felt they violated parole.

"A lot of guys might face an obstacle that you or I might face every day and they were not capable of solving the problem," said Bucklen.

According to Gnall, the DOC is trying to figure out what is causing the parolees' failures. She said they are using that data to design several new programs to help parole violators so they don't fail again.

Helping the Violators

One effort aimed at ensuring that these offenders don't continue to fail is a new parole violators unit, which opened in May, at the Joseph Coleman Center in Philadelphia. According to O'Connor, six people currently participate in this 90-day program designed to provide convicted violators with an alternative to re-imprisonment.

Those who are given this option receive constant assessment as well as group and individual counseling and behavioral treatment.

"It's much like a prison in some regard. But in the other regard they are going to get treatment," said O'Connor. Comparing the parole violators unit to the COR program, he said, "It's also not punitive. You have a bit more freedom."

Gnall said the DOC is also proposing a six to nine month program to take place in prisons, similar to the one at the Coleman Center, for parole violators who were sent back to prison for their offenses.

She also said the DOC is hoping to design "day-reporting centers," to help former inmates who have not violated their parole.

According to O'Connor the point of these centers would be to "keep people moving through the system instead of having them stall." He said a center would provide advice to a parolee about where to find job training within the community.

"We're actually looking to intervene before we get into the sanctions portion of this," O'Connor said.

The attention paid to developing programs such as these appears to be "something that's starting to catch on around the country," according the Bucklen.

The difference, according to O'Connor, is that corrections professionals are now aggressively evaluating the re-entry training that many states have already provided for a long time.

"We've always had programs," he said. "[Only now] we're assessing their effectiveness and making changes to these programs to increase their effectiveness."

Kazor points to the increased popularity of cognitive behavior therapy as a root of the increased interest in these sorts of programs.

"About one in four therapists in their field think of themselves as some sort of expert on cognitive behavioral therapy," he said. "We're seeing that it works in each area, and now we're seeing that it works in corrections."

He also said people need to remember that "a lot of the problems that we are trying to treat in the prisons are chronic, [or] lifelong." To help, he said, corrections departments need to emphasize that contact should not be broken with each parolee once he has returned to the community.

"If there is not follow-up, they will be back not matter how well we do," said Kazor.

Resources:

To see the results of the Pennsylvania DOC's Parole Violator Survey, click here: http://www.cor.state.pa.us/stats/lib/stats/PVSurvey7.pdf