Baltimore City and Reentry Right: How Returning Citizens Are Improving Baltimore’s Reentry System

This post is part of a series about our work with the 2nd cohort of the City Accelerator, an initiative from Living Cities and the Citi Foundation focused on municipal government and public engagement. In the second cohort led by the Engagement Lab, 5 cities rethink and reinvent public engagement, especially as it pertains to lower-income residents. In this series we’ll be sharing progress of the city’s projects as well as best practices and lessons for public engagement.

By: Daniel Atzmon (Prevention Specialist in the Baltimore Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice, City Accelerator Project Project Lead) and Kelly King (PhD candidate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, City Accelerator Project Coordinator)

Reentry is the process of returning to one’s community following a period of incarceration. Reentry has not been a national topic of conversation until recently. However, in Baltimore, we’ve been grappling with the challenges faced by this population for decades.

In the past few years, the situation has become acute. During the height of the drug war and zero-tolerance policing, thousands of young men and women were incarcerated, swelling the ranks of those who will eventually have to return to the homes, families, and neighborhoods they were forced to leave behind. Now our brothers, fathers, sisters and friends are coming home.

Like most parts of the criminal justice system, the reentry process has developed organically over time and now involves a collection of government agencies and non-profits, all trying their best to help people adjust to life ‘on the outside’. Yet serious challenges remain. Services are disconnected, poorly communicated and often fail to address key issues facing those returning home.

As Baltimore began developing its Reentry Right project, we realized that a key missing ingredient was the voices, experiences, and expertise of returning citizens themselves. While organizations have been working hard to address the many policy and programmatic issues involved in reentry, most of these groups have been disconnected from the populations they intended to serve. How can we expect well educated, privileged, civic and government leaders, who themselves are often disconnected, to develop an effective reentry system that is responsive to the lives of those it serves without any experience of incarceration and return? The prison or returning citizen population should be involved in the design of programs and services.

Through the Living Cities City Accelerator program, we are working to create a vehicle to not only receive important feedback from people who have experienced reentry, but also a way to include them in the design, and ultimately implementation, of solutions to the challenges they identified.

Focus Groups

We began this process with a series of five focus groups. Rather than lead these focus groups ourselves, we worked with five returning citizen leaders who would serve as our facilitators. The idea was to have peers lead the conversation as a way to elicit the kind of frank and honest feedback we needed. Our team held trainings for our five leaders and together we developed the questions and format of the groups.

These conversations were illuminating. We heard much of what we expected to hear: reentry planning in prison and jail facilities was virtually non-existent, information shared was out of date, the follow through and accessibility of services ‘outside the walls’ was subpar. We heard about the importance of housing, transportation, and jobs to help people find stability and the capacity to begin to rebuild lives.

But we were also struck by issues we had not previously considered and three key themes began to stand out. First, the nature of communication. Handing someone a piece of paper with a list of organizations and phone numbers is simply not enough. For a population which has been continually let down by institutions, this seemed like one more phone number to call that would only disappoint. The main question for reentering populations is: What will be the most immediate need on ‘the outside’ and how can I physically get to the assistance?

We found that the most successful and helpful services were shared by word of mouth, from trusted sources with firsthand knowledge. To us, this suggested a need to rethink the way we communicate.

Currently, participants themselves are helping design flyers, resource guides, and sharing opportunities with current inmates. Culturally responsive material and interaction behind the walls will begin to address this communication gap.

Second, we were heartbroken to hear the stories of families torn apart through incarceration and the immense challenges associated with reunification. A majority of our focus group participants had children and many lamented the missed opportunities to see them grow up. They were anxious to make up for lost time. Even on the ‘outside’, this is not easy. Our participants faced custody issues, housing and childcare challenges, as well as the immense emotional difficulty associated with rebuilding a relationship that was lost.

These issues seemed even more acute in our female focus group. In addition to family topics, we heard a lot about the unique difficulties facing women as they return home. Most services, perhaps the entire system, was designed with men in mind making even simple female needs a challenge to address. We heard about the humiliation of having to beg a man at a service organization for feminine hygiene products and having to find used bras and underwear in the prison lost and found in order to make it home upon release.

Focus group and dinner at Baltimore’s Safe and Sound Campaign

Co-Design Approaches

As we complete our focus groups, and move onto to working groups where we will co-design solutions to these challenges, it is easy to despair about the huge challenges faced by those returning from incarceration. But as we listened, shared a meal together and learned more about our participants, we were buoyed by their spirit, optimism, and excitement about confronting the challenges ahead.

With the help of expert facilitators and guidance from design professionals our participants and the involved agencies and organizations will develop concrete, actionable recommendations, like the improved communication materials mentioned above. This will all be done during our Design Day which, in addition to returning citizen participants and agency representatives will also include sharing opportunities with a separate event track. This track will be dealing with other reentry policy, data, and anti-stigma work and will include members of the public, policy makers, and organizations like Sun Light. This sharing over breakfast, lunch, and our conclusion/comments time will further inform our work and help include new insights we will carry into implementation.