STAR pairs with Fox to add financial literacy to reentry

By Ashley Akers and Monet Gerald

Understanding how to budget money is just difficult for many. From college students to the person next to you at the grocery store who is paying in exact change to feed their children, to the senior citizen worrying about how their family will cover the costs of their final expenses one day. However, there is a subset of the population that suffer from financial insecurity at an alarming rate — the reentering population.

Citizens reentering society from incarceration face many different financial burdens. Fines, court fees and attorney fees in conjunction with barriers to employment and inability to access credit can quickly find returning citizens in an insurmountable hole that may lead back to incarceration.

Jeffrey Boles, an Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business at Temple’s Fox Business School, recognizes financial literacy as an important barrier that needs to be addressed in order to help returning citizens become self-sufficient outside of prison. The Supervision to Aid Reentry Program, or STAR, in Philadelphia has partnered with the Fox Business school to add a financial literacy component to the reentry program. STAR is a federal reentry court program in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for Philadelphia residents on supervised release and functions as a partnership between U.S. Probation, the U.S. District Court, the Federal Defenders Office, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

According to Boles, Philadelphia’s STAR program decided to partner with the Fox Business School after witnessing the success of similar programs around the country. For example, the Missouri Reentry Process. Since 2002 the Missouri Department of Corrections has worked with several state agencies, including the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Workforce Development, to develop a model to help ex-offenders pre- and post-release with skills training, job placement, financial training, mental health referrals and housing.

“We are basically a collection of service providers that work together as a team to assess the needs of the participants of the program. Usually the participants are people who have been incarcerated and now are released,” Boles said.

Boles and his colleagues focus on strategies to help returning citizens with financial issues such as processing a car loan application, business ventures and housing. “It can range from some who want to start their own business. They have great ideas in an entrepreneurial way about starting a business where they see this need and they’re very motivated,” Boles said. “They have a lot of motivation to make this happen and we do as well.”

Aside from Boles, students also have strong beliefs on the issue of financial literacy among returning citizens. “A small group of our Fox students get selected for the program who are trained in basic financial matters and they present to the group background on maintaining a budget, opening a checking account and other matters.” he said.

“I see where financial literacy can be an advantage,” said Tina Allen-Freeman, a retired parole officer with 22 years of service. “When I started their financial goal was getting a job and going to the check cashing place and getting it cashed, because they didn’t have bank accounts, or it was difficult for them because they didn’t have the criteria met to do that.” In discussing post-release aftercare, Allen-Freeman suggests that developing a model to teach inmates about financial stability can be beneficial to reentry and tackling its many different components.

Though reentry programs across the country have garnered more and more attention, the efforts are not without problems.“Because it’s so vast and there are so many components to it…we need to know their needs and their weaknesses. We have to see the whole picture,” Allen-Freeman said. “It (corrections) has to branch out. People want to do things the same way and you can’t. And corrections is like an old dinosaur. The way we used to it, they still want to do it that way.”

Allen-Freeman cautions those that are implementing change, including those involved with the STAR program, to hear the community that they are serving. “The hardest transition is to get your model to work in that jail,” she said. “It’s very difficult to develop a model if you’re never worked in a jail. A lot of times the people that are developing the models or the people that write the grants have never been exposed to it, then they’re trying to teach someone who’s been exposed to for their entire career. You have to bring everybody to the table.”