Enhancing Family Relationships May Be Key to Successful Reentry

The Family Justice Program, a new program from the Vera Institute of Justice, is helping corrections, parole, and probation staff draw on families as a positive influence for their loved ones in the justice system.

The program shows staff and family members how they can help motivate behavior change—and ultimately improve public safety. The program tailors its tools and strategies for juvenile and adult systems throughout the country.

Using a Relational Inquiry Tool that consists of short questions to initiate dialogue, probation officials in Oklahoma City, for instance, have been able to help inmates start thinking about their relationships. The questions help ex-offenders determine if a particular relationship was a positive influence on them in the past and whether it will be a positive or negative influence in the future and how that relates to their overall well-being.

The first time she heard about the Family Justice program from Vera Institute, Susan Quigley, a probation and parole supervisor with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, remembers thinking that it was innovative, because the department previously had the attitude that offenders should be the probation officer’s sole consideration. Children, parents, girlfriends or boyfriends would be told to wait in another room during parole meetings, she explained.

“Now, to be told that actually we should be including them and incorporating them was something that I had never really heard about. Now, when somebody comes with an ex-offender, we take advantage of that—we bring all three people, or whoever it is, back. Whoever had enough interest in that person to come in with them is the person that we want back there with us in our corner, helping us out,” Quigley said.

The Family Justice model is making parole officers’ jobs easier by making the officers more aware of the kinds of situations people are in as well as the strengths and weaknesses that surround them.

To view the video, click here. To read the transcript, click here.

For more information on successful reentry strategies, visit Justice Fellowship’s Prisoner Reentry and Probation and Parole resource pages.