National Reentry Week: Another Nice Thing From DOJ
The Department of Justice is taking post-incarceration life seriously.
It feels like I’ve been writing lots of nice things about the Department of Justice lately. If so, that’s because Justice has been doing lots of nice things of its own: taking on unfair bail practices, addressing racial disparities in state courts, and banding with other federal agencies to support legal aid.
Now it’s time to add another nice thing to the list. Justice declared last week to be “National Reentry Week,” and went on to pair that appellation with real actions designed to ease federal inmates’ transitions from prison back to life on the outside.
Why is this a nice thing? The reason is pretty straightforward: people who have been released from prison generally have rough roads ahead of them. According to Justice, criminal records serve as barriers to “employment, housing, higher education, and credit,” and “these often-crippling barriers can contribute to a cycle of incarceration that makes it difficult for even the most well-intentioned individuals to stay on the right path and stay out of the criminal justice system.” And, frankly, everyone wins if people who’ve been released from prison don’t commit more crimes.
To address the barriers people face after they’ve been released from prison, Justice launched National Reentry Week with a speech by Attorney General Loretta Lynch in Philadelphia. In her speech, Lynch announced several programs to help inmates transition out of prison.
One of these is the Juvenile Reentry Assistance Program (which Lynch said “is just one of the many great ideas that have arisen in part from the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable” — so kudos to LAIR!). This program provides grants to public housing authorities to partner with legal aid organizations in order to expunge the criminal records of youth under age twenty-five (among other things); together with HUD Secretary Julian Castro, Lynch announced the first round of grant awardees along with her broader speech.
The bigger announcement, though, was the release of Justice’s “Roadmap to Reentry,” which Lynch characterized as “a major reform package that lays out a number of significant changes to how our Bureau of Prisons… prepares inmates for release, from their first day of incarceration to their first months of freedom.”
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The Roadmap to Reentry lays out five principles to guide the changes being undertaken at the Bureau of Prisons. First, according to the Roadmap, the Bureau should provide each inmate with an “individualized reentry plan” at the onset of incarceration, followed by a case plan to help “reduce the inmate’s likelihood of recidivism and support [the] inmate’s successful reintegration upon release.” Second, the Bureau should provide services ranging from education and employment training to substance-abuse and mental-health counseling, also designed to reduce recidivism and support reentry. Third, the Bureau should provide the “opportunity to build and maintain family relationships,” including increased availability of videoconferencing and special programs for the children of inmates. Fourth, the Bureau should “ensure individualized continuity of care” for individuals who have recently been released from prison, since many of them lack the resources and other support necessary to reintegrate into life outside prison. Fifth and finally, the Bureau should provide individuals preparing to leave federal custody with “comprehensive reentry-related information and access to resources.”
That seems like a pretty good set of principles. But Lynch didn’t stop there. In support of the Roadmap’s approach to reentry, Attorney General Lynch took the additional step of sending a letter to every state governor asking states to recognize federal Bureau of Prisons inmate identification cards (along with “authenticated release documents”) as “primary identification documents” necessary to obtain state-issued identification — a step that would eliminate at least one of the barriers faced by people transitioning out of prison.
And all that was just on day one of National Reentry Week. Lynch capped off the week with a speech in Mobile, Alabama, announcing still more programs to help people ease into their post-prison lives. Pointing to several businesses (Coca-Cola, Google, Starbucks, among others) that have pledged to “eliminat[e] unnecessary barriers to employment for applicants with criminal records, Lynch announced that all federal agencies, too, would “take steps toward ‘banning the box’ in their hiring processes.” (By way of explanation, Lynch added that “‘banning the box’ means delaying questions about criminal history until a conditional offer of employment has been made.”) Again, these are concrete steps that will help people find jobs — and, hopefully, avoid committing crimes.
Finally, Lynch noted that a body called the “Federal Interagency Reentry Council” would become a formal, “White House-level initiative.” It might be easy to dismiss a step like this as just a bit of bureaucratic tedium. But given that this council’s legal-aid counterpart, LAIR, has apparently spawned some real change (see, e.g., the Juvenile Reentry Assistance Program), maybe this bit of bureaucratic tedium is actually, well, yet another nice thing.
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Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at [email protected].
