Rhode Island Women's Reentry

The Prisoner Reentry Initiative (PRI) is designed to provide funding to state units of government to develop and implement institutional and community corrections-based offender reentry programs. The PRI strengthens urban communities characterized by large numbers of returning offenders. The PRI is designed to reduce recidivism by helping returning offenders find work and assess other critical services in their communities. The PRI supports strategies to deliver pre- and post-release assessments and services, and to develop transition plans in collaboration with other justice and community-based agencies and providers for supervised and non-supervised offenders.

The Rhode Island Department of Corrections (RIDOC) will use its PRI award to expand the use of a validated risk assessment tool, enhance vocational and employment preparation training for female inmates, provide staff-inmate communication training, and enhance community outreach services for inmates transitioning back into their communities. The RIDOC will pay salary and fringe benefit costs, support staff travel costs, purchase six laptop computers, and fund existing and new contracts. The RIDOC will overhaul its current method of risk/need assessment by implementing a formal reentry policy that will dictate the reentry process from initial assessment through release. This policy will be combined with a newly developed Transition from Prison to Community Database (TPCDS), which houses assessment and treatment planning data for each inmate reentering into the community. RIDOC will use their grant to expand existing computer literacy and culinary arts training to pre-release female inmates and provide skills-based training to staff to increase staff-inmate communication.

CA/NCF