New Publication: Improving Access to Services for Female Offenders Returning to the Community

In a single decade — 1999 to 2009 — the number of adult women incarcerated in U.S. prisons grew by 25 percent. Adult women now make up about 7 percent of the total inmate population, and they face many challenges upon release from prison. For example, women experience barriers to obtaining housing, greater difficulty in obtaining and sustaining employment, less family support, and more substance abuse than men. The programming offered to women while incarcerated, however, is usually modeled after the programs for male prisoners. As a group, women are often overlooked with regard to re-entry programming, and results from the recent evaluation of the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) showed that adult females reported a significantly higher need for services than men. This finding highlights a thread running through the re-entry literature that suggests a disconnect between the services individuals need to facilitate a successful re-entry into their community and the services they receive. Through SVORI, funding was provided to state and local jurisdictions to develop re-entry strategies for offenders returning to their communities. NIJ funded a multi-year, multisite evaluation of SVORI to examine the effect its programs had on access to re-entry services and programs and on housing, education, employment and criminal behavior. This evaluation, one of the largest NIJ-funded evaluations to date, included a sample of 357 adult females in 11 states who were returning to their communities. These women are the focus of this article, which can be accessed by clicking here.