When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry

This book disucsses the most important issue facing our neighborhoods and families over the next 10-20 years - re-entry! Re-entry is the process of prisoners returning home after years of separation from their families, jobs, and community. Joan Petersilia has conducted research on re-entry for many years. She describes the re-entry process, discusses the numerous legal issues, and identifies the day-to-day reality prisoners face as they come home. This book is written with the general public in mind, but is grounded is solid research and valuable for policy makers. It is easy to read and hard to put down. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand the problem and impact our recent years of incarceration has had on our population.

In "When Prisoners Come Home," Petersilia not only describes parole and reentry, but also the impact the war on drugs has had on young people. In short: too many people to prison, too many prisoner returns, and in the end--too many lost lives. The author also outlines the impact of a number of unintended consequences for families, communities, and children of the prisoners coming home.There hasn't been a book written on parole in over 30 years. This is a much needed publication and should be read by anyone interested in corrections and sentencing policy. However, anyone with even a casual interest in current correction's issues will find this book engaging, interesting, and easy to read.

This book deals with the most important topic of the coming decade for the criminal justice system: what to do when all of the massive numbers of criminals we have sent to prison come home. Petersilia not only describes all of the legal and practical hurdles criminals face when they begin reintegration, but she identifies how we can actually help them return to the community. This book is an easy read with an invaluable compilation of the latest statistics and summary of the challenges of life after incarceration. Petersilia has written an academic piece with both theoretical and policy influence. It is a must read for criminologists, but most importantly for all practitioners in the criminal justice system from police and prosecution to corrections and parole. For students, the book provides a necessary education of the implications of recent law and public policy. This is an excellent text for all of those interested in the criminal justice system. Petersilia succinctly describes what we have done wrong, then she provides recommendations for the future.

Today, there are more than 600,000 inmates leaving prison and returning to their communities each year. This high number taxes communities, the correctional system, and the resources needed to assist in the prison-community transition. This book deals with the most important correctional topic of the coming decade: what to do when all the prisoners come home. Petersilia not only describes how we help prisoners return, but also identified all of the legal and practical hurdles they face in their reintegration challenges. It is critical that those interested in corrections, community cohesion, and saving tax dollars read and understand the challenges and opportunities that are available in improving the reentry process. There has not been a new book on parole in 30 years. Petersilia's book is the major resource available to begin this study of prisoner reentry.Petersilia continues to define community corrections in her unique, empirically-oriented, style. Her writing is lucid, non-pretentious, and cutting-edge. Whether you are an academic or not, you will find this book totally readable and useful. This book goes through the entire parole and prisoner reentry continuum. Describing who is coming home, how well they are prepared, and what their contribution to crime in the community is likely to be. Petersilia also describes the impact on victims.Victim advocates will find the chapter on how victims can play a stronger role in parole and reentry as excellent.Petersilia not only describes parole and reentry, but the impact of the war on drugs on young people. Too many people to prison, to many prisoner returns...and too many lost lives. Petersilia outlines a number of unintended consequences for families, communities, and children of all the prisoners coming home.Petersilia identifies 12 policy recommendations for rethinking prison programs, parole release, and post-prison supervision. This book should be of tremendous use to correctional practitioners, academics, and all those interested in correctional policy. Strongly recommended.

When Prisoners Come Home draws on both qualitative and quantitative data to critically examine the "prisoner reentry problem," a timely and important social problem. As Petersilia explains, "we spent the last decade debating who should go to prison, for how long, and how we might pay for it, and we paid virtually no attention to how we would cope with prisoners after they left prison" (p. 14). This book, then, begins with the fact that "never before in U.S. history have so many individuals been released from prison." To quote the numbers provided by Petersilia, "95% of the 1.4 million prisons inmates now in prison will eventually be released and will return to communities-635,000 people in 2002 and at least that many in future years" (p. 1). As detailed in When Prisoners Come Home, prisoners remain largely uneducated and unskilled and usually lack solid family supports. Moreover, about three quarters of all prisoners have substance abuse problems and one in six suffers from mental illness. These facts, coupled with an increasingly punitive public sentiment and political rhetoric about prisoners and diminishing resources devoted to rehabilitation, ensure that problems abound. When Prisoners Come Home assembles empirical evidence to describe and assess the prisoner reentry problem. Conceptualizing "prisoner reentry" as "all activities and programming conducted to prepare ex-convicts to return safely to the community and to live as law abiding citizens" (p. 3), Petersilia devotes specific chapters to skillfully examining the characteristics of U.S. returning prisoners, reviewing historical and current parole release and supervision practices, assessing of what is known about the effectiveness of prisoner reentry programs, and summarizing parolee recidivism and its contribution to crime in America. Moreover, she masterfully details how we help prisoners through rehabilitation, how we hinder reintegration through various legal and practical barriers, and how victims do and do not play a role in the larger process of prisoner reentry. Finally, and most importantly, in the final chapter Petersilia offers twelve empirically justified recommendations on how to improve prisoner reentry. Combined, these chapters set the stage for Petersilia's most compelling observation, which is made in the final chapter: Having made this detailed analysis of parole and prisoner reentry in the United States, one must conclude that we could not have designed a more ineffective system had we set out to do so. For most offenders, corrections does not correct. Indeed the conditions under which many inmates are handled are detrimental to successful reintegration, and many of the restrictions we place on returning prisons prove deeply counterproductive. For Petersilia, "the irony is that more punitive crime control policies, particularly ones that rely heavily on prisons, contribute further to the declines in social support that produced crime in the first place" (p. 245). Thu