Soliciting and Garnering the Perspectives of Formerly and Currently Incarcerated People to Develop Effective Reentry Policy and Practices

The Visiting Fellows Program furthers the Department's mission by bringing talent and expertise from the field to BJA to inform policy and practice and create new tools for the field to disseminate knowledge of effective and innovative approaches to priority criminal justice issues. It is funded under Economic High-Tech and Cyber Crime Prevention, Services for Trafficking Victims, Second Chance Act, Prison Rape Elimination Act, and Swift and Certain Sanctions/Replicating the Concepts Behind Project HOPE.

The Fellow, Daryl Vincent Atkinson, will work in collaboration with BJA and DOJ staff to help provide critical outreach, data, research, and subject-matter expertise to inform the development of new BJA strategies and programs to benefit the field related to the Second Chance Act and reentry. The project will focus on the people most directly affected by mass incarceration and recidivism to find new policy solutions. The input from directly affected people will be obtained through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis including one on one interviews with highly successful formerly incarcerated leaders in the criminal justice and reentry field. In addition, the Fellow will conduct in-person town hall style meetings with other people with criminal records and their families to test the major findings gleaned from the interviews with the highly successful formerly incarcerated leaders. This information will be combined and field tested with people in prison to test if the learnings gained from the prior two groups are consistent with people still in prison. The findings will be summarized in a final report and reentry policy recommendations, based on the input from directly affected people, will be made to BJA.

CA/NCF