Program aims to ease ex-cons’ transition

By Tasha Kates

Published: September 1, 2008

For an inmate who is getting out of jail, starting over without any support can feel impossible.

The Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail and the OAR/Jefferson Area Community Corrections Program are hoping to reduce recidivism by creating a transitional program for inmates who have served their sentences.

The re-entry program not only will feature available services to get people on their feet, but it will include a mentoring component to give them support to get away from a life of crime.

The mentors will serve as a resource and a sounding board to the inmates as they try to adjust, said Pat Smith, executive director of the local offender aid and restoration program.

“They can come here and get services, but the goal is that a mentor would get them through the process,” Smith said.

The pilot program is part of a statewide initiative to help inmates transition back into home life without illegal activity. OAR, the jail and the Departments of Social Services in Albemarle County and Charlottesville banded together to try a local version. The program is a smaller version of a re-entry police academy program, in which Virginia is one of five states participating.

For the last year and a half, a re-entry council and four subcommittees have been meeting to figure out how to get services for released inmates more quickly. The groups have been focusing on employment, education, housing, mental health and substance abuse. The one resource that doesn’t exist in the community now is a post-release mentoring program.

Bob Rannigan, a psychotherapist and chairman of the social reintegration committee, said it takes more than services for a former inmate to avoid going back to jail.

“To come back out is complicated, because you’ve established behavior patterns that got you in trouble,” Rannigan said. “The mentoring program intends to help them understand the inaccurate and inappropriate assumptions and help them access resources in the community that they might not otherwise try to get to.”

A portion of the jail population hasn’t been able to do that. Col. Ronald Matthews, the jail’s superintendent, estimates that 27 percent of the jail’s inmates are readmitted. The jail, which usually holds about 540 inmates, releases on average seven people a day back into the community.

Matthews said the ideal inmate candidate is someone who returns to jail regularly because he doesn’t have an education or steady job and may abuse substances or have mental health issues.

The mentors are volunteers who are matched with a person for up to two years, helping that person get the services he needs and providing moral support. Right now, Smith said “two or three” people are being trained to teach volunteers how to meet the needs of former inmates.

Denny Wilson, an associate pastor at Mount Eagle Baptist Church, said he has done that kind of work before in his hometown of Indianapolis. The subcommittee member didn’t run into any resistance while helping families, although he said he knows that former inmates sometimes feel tempted to return to their old ways.

“I think peer pressure is one of the most difficult things to get past,” Wilson said. “You get right back into the same community, but you have to change your habits and lifestyles.”

Right now, the jail’s formula for re-entry includes in-house counseling, more educational opportunities in jail and a larger stock of psychotropic drugs given to outgoing inmates to tide them over before they can get a doctor’s appointment. Matthews said the jail is hoping to bring back a transition coordinator position in the next two months to help with the program. The position, which was previously an entry-level job funded through AmeriCorps, would likely be paid for by the jail and OAR.

Smith said she is hoping all components of the re-entry program will be in place in six months.