For more than a decade, Ohio prisons have been working to help tens of thousands of inmates transition back into the community. Building bridges to social services, housing and employment in the community is thought to reduce recidivism.
Corrections Corporation of America took the step of opening a stand-alone “Re-Entry Center,” where inmates can learn job and interview skills, write and upload their resumes online, learn how to get their driver’s license back, and take classes and programs designed to ease their transition outside the fence. Job fairs held twice a year draw between 160 and 200 inmates.
The Correctional Institution Inspection Committee, a bipartisan state agency that serves as a prison watchdog, said in a report last year that Lake Erie Correctional “has two dedicated reentry staff, including a case manager and a reentry coordinator. This is unusual and excellent.”
Lake Erie Correctional Institution Warden Brigham Sloan said the prison works with employers in northeast Ohio to encourage them to consider hiring ex-convicts.
“It’s a long-term process of educating employers. Just because you’ve been incarcerated, doesn’t mean that you can’t be useful and productive to an employer. I think there is a stigma that has been attached, but I think that’s part of the overall reform effort that we’ve seen going on with criminal justice, is that we don’t have to automatically exclude inmates from opportunities with working on the outside,” Sloan said.
Planning for an inmate’s return to his community starts on day one, he said.
“The programs are no longer about ‘Let’s babysit the inmate. Let’s keep the inmate busy.’ They’re about what useful tools, skills and abilities can we offer the inmates,” he said.
Recidivism is not tracked by individual prison so there is no way to tell whether the privately-owned and operated Lake Erie facility does a better job than other Ohio prisons. Overall, 27.5 percent of inmates released by Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction return to prison in three or fewer years.
Sloan said CCA offers programs that research shows work.
Inmate Michael Parker, of Cleveland, who is seven years into a 10-year sentence, said he found the re-entry center’s empowerment workshop the most useful one he has attended so far.
“Just to empower a person that’s been through you know time, doing time. To empower a person and let him know that the community would be accepting and you can get back on your feet,” said Parker, a former trucking business owner and mortgage broker who was convicted of drug possession and other charges.
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