Law Enforcement
More than 700,000 individuals were released from state and federal prisons in 2007,1 and approximately 9 million people are released from jails every year.2 Officers in small towns and large urban centers alike repeatedly encounter and arrest many of these individuals — often shortly after they leave prison or jail. Returning individuals’ safe and successful reentry depends on many factors, such as fulfillment of their educational needs, access to mental health and drug treatment, job readiness, connections with family, housing availability, and others that could help them avoid future criminal activity. Law enforcement professionals are uniquely positioned to engage their community policing networks of service providers who can help address these needs. They can also be important partners with institutional and community corrections, enhancing supervision when appropriate, which will increase the accountability of people released from prisons and jails and improve public safety.
- West, H.C. & W. Sabol. Prisoners in 2007. NCJ 224280. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2008. www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p07.pdf.
- Beck, A.J. The Importance of Successful Reentry to Jail Population Growth. Presented at the Urban Institute's Jail Reentry Roundtable, June 27, 2006. www.urban.org/projects/reentry-roundtable/upload/beck.PPT.
Key Resources
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Webinar: Local Government Roles in Rentry, National Reentry Resource Center (2010)
On August 26, 2010 the National Reentry Resource Center, with the support of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice, hosted a webinar about local government roles in reentry. The webinar discussed how local government agencies can establish and sustain reentry efforts, and how these efforts affect local budgets. Reentry tools and resources available to local governments, such as the Urban Institute’s Transition from Jail to Community Implementation Toolkit were profiled.
To watch the webinar, please click here. To download the PowerPoint slides used in this webinar, please click here.
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Planning and Assessing a Law Enforcement Reentry Strategy, Justice Center (2008)
The Justice Center partnered with the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), with support from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (the COPS Office), to develop a report that focuses on law enforcement reentry strategies. Planning and Assessing a Law Enforcement Reentry Strategy integrates information on effective practices with an interactive assessment to form a toolkit for designing and evaluating reentry approaches involving law enforcement agencies. -
Law Enforcement Reentry Initiative: Learning Sites, Justice Center (2007)
The Justice Center and PERF have chosen four COPS-supported "learning sites" that will plan and implement various recommendations and proposed strategies from the toolkit. The selected law enforcement agencies are Muskegon County (Mich.) Sheriff’s Department, Metropolitan (D.C.) Police Department, the Las Vegas (Nev.) Metropolitan Police Department, and the White Plains (N.Y.) Police Department. The sites will conduct a needs assessment and receive targeted technical assistance from reentry experts. -
Prisoner Reentry and Community Policing Strategies for Enhancing Public Safety, Urban Institute (2006)
This document contains four papers that explore how community policing can respond to the challenges of prisoner reentry and public safety within the context of community concerns, sentencing policy, and corrections. The papers were commissioned by the Urban Institute to facilitate the eighth meeting of the Reentry Roundtable, titled "Community Policing and Prisoner Reentry: Strategies for Enhancing Public Safety," which was held in May 2004. Meeting participants discussed various perspectives on the role of law enforcement and community policing in tackling the public safety consequences of the increasing number of individuals entering and leaving the nation's prisons each year. -
Building an Offender Reentry Program: A Guide for Law Enforcement, International Association of Chiefs of Police
This document highlights law enforcement-involved reentry program profiles. The guide presents key strategies, components, and results of law enforcement participation in offender reentry efforts.