Joan Fabian has served in county and state corrections for 45 years, the last seven as Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Corrections. In May the Minnesota DOC joined with Prison Fellowship in co-sponsoring an Out4Life Conference in Minneapolis as a springboard to establishing coalitions throughout the state to assist prisoners returning to their communities. Even prior to Out4Life, the Minnesota DOC has been a strong proponent of building collaborative efforts to provide prisoners with a comprehensive array of support services and resources. The positive results of these efforts have been dramatic. Prison Fellowship Senior Editor Becky Beane recently talked with Commissioner Fabian about the benefits of collaborations in equipping returning prisoners for success.
BB: The Minnesota Department of Corrections is known as a leader in prisoner reentry. What motivated the DOC to become so actively involved in helping prisoners reintegrate?
JF: I think it’s the way the department grew up in Minnesota. Back in the 1970s we had some really wise policymakers and lawmakers who saw that we can’t build our way to public safety with more prisons. So we started a focus on community corrections—saving our expensive prison beds for the most serious offenders and keeping the rest in the community while holding them accountable and under supervision. Our neighbor, Wisconsin, has about the same general population as Minnesota. Yet we incarcerate about 9,600 prisoners compared with 24,000 in Wisconsin.
Inside the prisons we’ve always had good educational opportunities, CD [chemical dependency] treatment, sex offender treatment, and vocational training. And because of that, our recidivism rate has been low [36 percent of released prisoners are reconvicted within three years, compared with the national rate of 67 percent]. But we realized we still weren’t doing enough to make sure their transition to the outside was successful and coordinated.
Collaboration Works!Two-Year Results of the Minnesota Comprehensive Offender Reentry Plan (MCORP)
|
BB: What changed?
JF: A few years ago there began a national effort to develop resources for prisoner reentry—including the involvement of the National Governors Association and the federal prisoner reentry initiative [the Second Chance Act], which offered state grants. Our governor pressed for state agencies to work together on reentry to make sure we were maximizing our resources. Out of that grew our statewide initiative, MCORP [Minnesota Comprehensive Offender Reentry Plan] in 2005. This is a collaborative effort that includes multiple state agencies—the departments of education, public safety, employment and economic development, health, housing finance, veterans affairs, the state court system, human services, and others—as well as county and local corrections and organizations.
The goal was to lower recidivism by increasing offenders’ access to important reentry services such as employment, housing, education and vocational programming, family reintegration, CD treatment, and community support—including faith-based support and mentoring. We piloted MCORP in three key areas and plan to have something going on in all 87 counties. And we’ve had some really promising evaluation outcomes! (See box at end.)
BB: From your many years of experience in corrections, what do you consider the most critical challenges prisoners face as they reenter the community?
JF: The unintended collateral consequences. I think when lawmakers pass a lot of the laws, they don’t realize that it’s really not helping to put so many restrictions [on released prisoners] that they can’t live in certain places and can’t work in certain places. Right now all of them are so demonized—people paint every offender with the same broad brush stroke. But I wouldn’t have stayed in this business as long as I have if I hadn’t seen the transformation so many offenders make when they are given the opportunity. You’re going to have a small minority who won’t take that opportunity and are not going to change—and probably should be locked up forever because they are dangerous. But two-thirds of our [released] offenders don’t recidivate! And that’s because of our initiatives and a lot of people who really care about what’s happening to them.
BB: What contribution do you think churches and other faith-based groups bring to collaborative reentry efforts?
JF: One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that faith-based volunteers are always there; they have a heart for this work. They truly care. One of the collaboratives we have is R3, a group of about 50 Christian organizations in the state that work together to help people on their road to Recovery, Reentry, and Renewal. They provide a searchable database of services and resources so that people can easily find what they need. One of its members is CCTP—Construction Career Training Program—started by a good Christian man who owns a very successful construction company. He started bringing together his network of construction company CEOs who agreed to hire ex-offenders. CCTP not only provides good-paying jobs but mentors as well. You talk about a transformation! And it’s all because of the good hearts and strong commitment of these people who want to help.
Also, I think one of the “best practices” of reentry is giving offenders the opportunity to find God in their lives. We have IFI in two of our Minnesota prisons [the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a pre- and post-release reentry program developed by Prison Fellowship]. When you walk into the IFI living area, compared with other cell blocks, there is such a feeling of peace, a feeling of joy, a feeling of hopefulness. Preliminary data suggest that offenders who have gone through IFI successfully are returning to prison at a much lower rate than others.
BB: You mentioned “best practices.” Through your experience with collaborations, what have you found to be some of the best practices in helping prisoners successfully reenter the community?
JF: One, certainly, is getting good assessments of what the real problems are for individual prisoners. Then, based on each assessment, determining an individual plan that addresses those specific problems and needs. And our clients need to be a direct part of making that plan for their future.
Another best practice—and this can be difficult for some of our nonprofits and churches—is having measurable outcomes so that we can know what works and doesn’t work. There are some things we started doing a certain way years ago, and now we have research that tells us it doesn’t work. But there is still a reluctance on many people’s part to stop doing it because it feels good to us.
BB: Can you give an example?
JF: Yes, raising self-esteem is something people thought was so important to stopping criminal behavior, and we now know it’s not.
BB: What are some of the areas that need to be strengthened, in terms of helping ex-prisoners?
JF: The first thing that comes to mind is finding housing for returning sex offenders. I think there are resources out there, but no one wants to take on the liability. But they are human beings, and a whole lot of them want to change, but there is understandably no love or pity for them from most people. But if they don’t have a place to live, then we don’t have a place to go and check up on them. So how do we keep track of them? Helping them change is a public safety issue as well as a reentry issue.
BB: How do you see Out4Life adding to what you have already been doing in the field of reentry in Minnesota?
JF: I am real happy about Out4Life becoming a part of this effort. About 8,000 men and women get released every year from our state prisons, and another 8,000 get released from the jails. So there is plenty of work to do in helping them succeed. Collaboration is the only way to go, because it’s too massive an endeavor to do it alone.