Social Ties and the Reentry Journey
In the first post of this series, our founder D. Nkosi Cain introduced Touchdown NYC. Here in Part Two, we share how our team conducted intensive, community-based research during the Blue Ridge Labs Fellowship to learn about the reentry experience from individuals returning from incarceration. Read on for the insights that led us to design our mentorship platform for returning citizens.
When we began our research on the reentry experience, we knew the statistics were grim. Over six million Americans, or roughly 1 in 40, are currently under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison). Over 100,000 people are released from prisons and jails every year in New York State alone, and 77% of those will be arrested again within five years.
We also knew that effectively and conscientiously bringing technology to the reentry space would be a challenge. Using a smartphone or navigating the web can be intimidating for someone who’s been away for years or decades, and sharing personal information on an unfamiliar platform requires a high degree of trust.
But we also knew that traditional reentry programs don’t have the capacity to reach everyone who needs help. Funding for reentry programs is at 30-year lows, while case loads continue to increase — often leading to burn-out for their frontline employees.
Our goal was to identify the gaps in the reentry ecosystem and explore how technology might play a role in serving the thousands of people returning home to New York City each year.
Our team shared a belief that those closest to the problem have the greatest insights into potential solutions, so we took a human-centered design approach to learn from returning citizens and their loved ones, case workers, and service providers.
We began by speaking with dozens of community members through a series of interviews. When asked about their biggest reentry challenges, people brought up many of the things one might expect: housing, employment, government benefits.
But when we listened more deeply, we also heard about how hard it was to reconnect with family and friends after years of separation. We heard about the sense of isolation when relationships formed inside prison came to an abrupt end after release. And we heard that many people felt lost trying to navigate the maze of reentry services on their own.
One case manager told us about a client:
“He felt like no one cared. He felt like he was lost. He shared with me that he was going to do bad things because he had to eat. He got discouraged and he gave up.”
Compounded by challenges like unstable housing that leads to frequent relocation and parole compliance that prohibits contact with others who have a criminal record, lack of social support stood out to us as an important gap.
Academic research backs this up. Returning citizens with high social support are 27% less likely to be rearrested. Some researchers consider strong social ties to be so critical that they believe sustained economic achievement is rarely achieved without them.
Yet many returning citizens struggle to build and maintain relationships through traditional reentry programs, social media, or their own social networks. Most reentry programs have a model in which social workers each help hundreds of returning citizens each year due to limited funding and capacity, making it impossible to form strong relationships with all of their clients. Other tech-based interventions, like social media or reentry apps, fail to account for the unique context of a population that has low digital literacy and wariness towards sharing personal information.
This unmet need for social support was the biggest takeaway from our research, and became the foundation for Touchdown NYC. In our next post, we’ll share how we turned these insights into a nonprofit technology platform that provides mentorship for returning citizens.
