Why does the Urban Institute research prisoners reentering communities?
We found in the late 1990s that over a half million U.S. prisoners return home every year. (That number has since risen to about 650,000.) No one tracked them after release. So we at the Urban Institute decided to study exactly what happens when prisoners walk out that door. The projects focus on reentry and reintegration—how do people come back into homes and into communities after they’ve been away for some time? Readjustment doesn’t happen overnight. We wanted to study people who are released from a state prison, not a local jail, because typically they would have been incarcerated for at least a year. As each state handles prisoner reentry differently, research is a challenge. Several trends over the past few decades make former prisoners’ lives even harder. Parole was transformed in the late 1980s/early 1990s, away from helping people connect to services and more toward surveillance and enforcement. Less than half of people placed on parole complete it successfully—that hasn’t cha
