Police should help former prisoners reenter their communities, but too often are reluctant to be involved, a Harvard study says.
“Police should embrace the reality of people returning to their communities as a public safety challenge and promote a problem-solving strategy for reducing the re-arrest rates of people coming home from prison,” the study concludes.
The study says early police intervention in the reentry process could reduce crime and recidivism.
There are complications to collaboration between community-based rehabilitation programs and police, the report notes: Communities with high crime rates view police “as agents of an unjust system deeply rooted in a history of racial oppression” and police view those communities “as tolerant of criminal behavior and resistant to police intervention.”
The relationship is further complicated because police often view themselves as strictly enforcers of the law and consider additional responsibilities of engaging in the reentry process as contrary to their mission and a waste of limited resources, the study reports.
Early research shows combining police community-based programs in the reentry process have been successful “when intensive supervision was coupled with treatment-oriented programs,” according to the study.
After years of increasing prison populations, policymakers, elected officials and criminal justice practitioners are belatedly focusing on the consequences.
The Chicago Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative has shown a 37 percent decrease in the homicide rate and the Boston Reentry Initiative showed a 30 percent reduction.
The Harvard study cautions that police should not become an extension of the supervision mission of parole and probation nor should those agencies simply adopt a law enforcement stance. It also notes the subject is still “largely uncharted territory and…still being debated.”
The report, Exploring the Role of the Police in Prisoner Reentry, can be found at http://www.hks.harvard.edu/criminaljustice/executive_sessions/policy.htm
