Time, Space, and Occupational Patterns: Ex-Offender’s
Experiences of Community Reintegration
Jaime Phillip Muñoz, PhD, OTR, FAOTA - Duquesne University,
Department of Occupational Therapy John Sciulli MOT, OTR/L &
Mila Eggers, MOT, OTR/L, Goodwill Industries Community
Reintegration Program, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The Context: A County Jail
The environmental context of the Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is typical of most jails in the U.S:
overcrowded and with limited rehabilitation personnel. The ACJ has
a prisoner capacity of 1,850 but in 2005 the average daily capacity
was 2,394.1 Caseworkers are assigned to each inmate. Their primary
task is to determine the specific needs of an inmate and decide
what programs, services, and legal assistance may help the inmate
reintegrate back into their community. In 2005, daily caseloads at
the ACJ exceeded 300 inmates per caseworker. 1
Incarcerated (1999) - by Keith Wallace Smith, Terra-cotta, Matt
Glaze, Iron
Acknowledgements: I am indebted to the following individuals who
are just a few of many collaborators whose support ensured the
success of these programs and this research. Eric Yenerall,
Assistant Vice President of Goodwill Industries of Pittsburgh, Mike
Olack, Director of Community Reintegration for Goodwill, jack
Pischke, the ACJ Inmate Program Administrator, and the entire
Reintegration Team including Justin Hewitt, JoAnn Lippock, Troy
Terry, Maurice Williams, and Allan Alexander. Special thanks to the
Rainbow Research Team for their support and assistance, especially
Joy Lisak, Teressa Garcia, Cecilia Vaughn and Kristi Lynch.
Preliminary Results
Methods
Participants: Men who successfully completed the CRP curricula
and maintained community tenure 1 year post-release were identified
from an extant data base maintained by CRP staff. Names were
cross-checked with a Bureau of Corrections data base to check
recidivism status. To date, 7 men have been interviewed and 30
additional interviewees have been identified. Participants receive
a $25 grocery voucher immediately upon completion of the interview.
Instrumentation: An electronic RESEARCHER’S JOURNAL was initiated
as a repository for initial bracketing of ideas of incarceration
and reentry and reflexive analysis of the data generation and data
analysis processes. It also serves as one method of generating an
audit trail for the study. Selected PERSONAL DEMOGRAPHIC DATA that
could be used to describe the participants (e.g., age, release
date, educational and criminal histories, etc.) were culled form
existing data bases maintained by the Community Reintegration
Program. An INTERVIEW GUIDE was developed using conceptual
perspectives gleaned from the community reintegration and
recidivism literature as well as OT and occupational science
literature on time use, habits and person environment interaction.
The interview was pilot tested with 2 former CRP participants who
met inclusion criteria. These participants provided feedback on the
clarity and flow of the interview. Sample interview questions are
shown below. • Grand Tour Question: Tell me about what your life
has been like since your release. • The purpose of the CRP program
is to assist ex-offenders with community reintegration. What does
that term, community reintegration, mean to you?
• What kinds of things do you do that show you are engaged in
the community?
• Tell me about your own transition. • Are their things that
you are doing that help you feel that you’ve been successful with
your transition to the community?
• Think about the time right before you went into the ACJ. What
was going on in your life? • Tell me about a typical day then.
What is a typical day like now?
• I sometimes think about my own life as having a rhythm –
there have been periods in my own life where the beat is good and
times when it’s been out of tune. • What kind of rhythm does you
life have right now? What was the rhythm like before your
incarceration? During your incarceration?
Data Generation: Primary method was 1:1 qualitative interviewing
using an interview guide to help direct and ensure some consistency
among interviews. The guide has been refined as data generation and
analysis has proceeded. Follow-up interviews have not yet been
completed but will be confirmatory in nature and focused on
verifying initial interpretations of the data. Data Analysis:
Analysis began with initial open coding using line-by-line
microanalysis followed by the generation of an initial coding
matrix after the 2nd interview which was reviewed and revised with
each new interview. Data were reduced using constant comparative
analysis and code-recode processes. Axial coding was used to refine
codes into meaningful categories.
Discussion and Conclusions
These preliminary results reflect the complexity of successful
transition for ex-offenders. The men in this study were
multi-problem individuals. Each was faced with a variety of
personal, familial, societal and legal barriers to community
reentry. Typical needs included housing, drug counseling, financial
assistance, specific tangible support for items such as food and
clothing, custody, parenting and legal issues, and transportation.
Family, employment, and the community each offered meaningful
opportunities for participation in the mores of community life.
Person-environment interaction perspectives that advocate for
participation in occupation as the medium for engagement in the
community may offer fresh perspectives on community reentry for
ex-offenders. There are clear limitations to this study. The
results reported here are preliminary and additional interviews,
peer reviews of analyses and member checking of the data will
support the trustworthiness of future analyses. This is also a
study of formerly incarcerated men in one setting who participated
in one program. As such, readers must carefully consider the
transferability of this data to populations that they work
with.
References 1) Allegheny County Bureau of Corrections (2005).
2005 Annual report. Retrieved March 17, 2006, from
http://www.county.allegheny.pa.us/jail/ 2) Legal Action Center
(2004). After prison: Roadblocks to reentry. A report on state
legal barriers facing people with criminal records. Retrieved
April 2, 2006, from
http://www.lac.org/lac/upload/lacreport/LAC_PrintReport.pdf 3)
Travis, J. & Visher, C. (2005). Prisoner reentry and public
safety. Cambridge University Press. 4) Hughes, T. & Wilson,
D.J. (2003). Reentry trends in the United States. Washington, D.C.:
Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of
Justice. 5) Langan, P.A. & Levin, D.J. (2002). Recidivism
of prisoners released in 1994. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice
Statistics. 6) Taxman, F.S., Young, D., Byrne, J.M. &
Holsinger, A. & Anspach, D. (2002). From prison safety to
public safety: Innovations in offender reentry. 7) University of
Maryland, College Park Bureau of Governmental Research. Retrieved
1/4/2005 from http://www.bgr.umd.edu/Reentry/NIJ1.pd 8) Eggers,
M., Muñoz, J.P., Sciulli, J., Crist, P. (2006). The Community
Reintegration Project: Occupational therapy at work in a county
jail.
Occupational Therapy in Health Care, 20,1, 17-37. 9)
Petersilia, J. (2004). What works in prisoner reentry? Reviewing
and questioning the evidence. Federal Probation, 68, 2, 4-8.
The Allegheny County Jail - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
As correctional institutions, jails differ from prisons in
important ways. Detainees in a jail may not be sentenced, their
length of stay is shorter and more unpredictable than in a prison,
and there are hundreds of temporary and permanent "movements" in
and out of a jail every day. These could be persons going to or
coming from Criminal Court hearings, prisoners brought to jail by
authorities, or new releases. In comparison, a prison population is
much more stable and the transient nature of the jail population
has implications for programs and services.
Community Reintegration
Ex-offenders face multiple barriers to community reintegration.
In most states, an ex-offender can be denied jobs, can be banned
from public assistance, food stamp or student loan programs, can
have their criminal history information available through the
Internet, can be denied federally assisted housing, and in all but
2 states can have restrictions placed on their right to vote.2
Community reentry is not an option, it is inevitable since everyone
who is incarcerated is eventually released, dies or is executed.3
Over 650,000 people are released from U.S. correctional
institutions each year. Statistics suggests that two thirds of them
will be rearrested within 3 years.4 The first year post-release is
a particularly critical period as nearly one third of those
released are incarcerated again within 6 months and nearly half
return within the first year post-release.5
Given this high rate of recidivism, society needs
evidenced-based community re-entry programs. Model programs include
services which emphasize the development of a skill set that
supports community living and effective planning for reentry.6
Reentry programs reported in the corrections literature are varied
and are often based in the disciplinary perspectives of psychology,
sociology and/or criminology.7 Occupational therapy has the
capacity to develop evidence-based, community-based reintegration
programs that reduce recidivism and which are grounded in
occupational therapy and occupation science. The Community
Reintegration Project (CRP) is an OT program at the ACJ.8 The
primary goals of this program are to reduce recidivism and
facilitate community reintegration. Inmates participate in skill
development groups while incarcerated and in intensive 1:1 case
management services focused on helping the person obtain/retain
employment and successfully reintegrate into the community once
released. Follow-up continues for 1-year post-release. In the first
4 years, 279 ex-offenders have completed the program and the rate
of recidivism for participants is 36%. The overall recidivism rate
of the ACJ is estimated to be between 71-77%.1 The use of the rate
of recidivism as the primary method of measuring community
reintegration ignores the complexity of the process a person uses
to establish themselves as a productive member of society.9 This
poster reports preliminary data from a study that attempts to
better understand the process of community reintegration for
ex-offenders.
Research Design
This study employs a phenomenological design to understand the
lived experience of community reintegration from ex-offenders’
perspectives. In particular, we are interested in these men's
descriptions of their community participation with specific
emphasis on how and where they choose to spend their time.
“Rob”, an informant for this study – during his most recent
incarceration
Contributors: John Sciulli, MOT, OTR/L, Lead Reintegration
Specialist & Mila Eggers, MOT, OTR/L, Reintegration Specialist,
Community Reintegration Project
A - 25, White, GED education, convicted of Possession with
Intent to Deliver (PWID), 2nd incarceration, separated, 2 kids B -
25, White, HS education, convicted of Retail Theft, 4th
incarceration, single no children C - 32, Black, GED education,
convicted of Civil Contempt, 2nd incarceration, single, 4 children
D - 41, Black, HS education, convicted of PWID, 4th incarceration,
single, 6 children E - 41, Black, HS education, convicted of Civil
Contempt, 1st incarceration, married, 3 children F - 44, White, no
GED, convicted of PWID, 3rd incarceration, widower, 1 child,
Bipolar Disorder G - 50, Black, HS education, convicted of PWID, 1s
incarceration, single, 3 grown children, PTSD
The Participants: Participants ranged in age from 25-50. Two
participants first experienced incarceration after age 40, but all
the rest were incarcerated before age 21. All except two had been
incarcerated at least twice. Most participants were single, One was
married and one was a widower. All but one had children.
Predominant Themes: A multitude of factors are necessary to support
successful reentry into the community. These factors include
personal beliefs, motivations and behaviors and a broad array of
familial factors. Additionally, person environment interactions in
employment and community contexts may present both barriers and
opportunities for meaningful participation in occupations that
support reintegration.
“People, places and things. You can’t go back into the same
environment. You can’t go into a bar and drink a pop. I can not go
to, like my relatives still sell drugs, use drugs. I haven’t
visited them since I got outta jail.
No, people, places and things will get you in trouble.” -
Participant F Personal: The men identified behavioral routines they
felt supported reentry such as avoiding people who might influence
participation in criminal activities or increasing their pursuit of
non-criminal activities. Intrapersonal processes ranging from
spiritual connections to their life circumstances, to cognitive
processes used to consider consequences before acting, to
maintaining a sense of resolve to avoid going back to jail were
predominant themes in the interviews.
“I avoid my relatives. Anybody, any of my friends in the past
that used drugs.” - Participant B
“I see the same faces coming back in. I told myself right then
and there, I’m going to be the one [who remains out of jail].” –
Participant G
“I know peoples gonna sit up there and say, Oh I can’t find a
job, no one will hire me, you can’t find this, you can’t find that.
You got to make your own way.” – Participant F
Family: Family plays an integral role in the reentry process.
All of the men spoke of needing to (re)establish connectedness.
Nearly all spoke of a more focused effort to manage family roles
and the influence of their behavior on their children's’ lives. “I
can’t keep running in and out [of the
kids lives]. Cause how you think the kids would feel? Oh, there
goes dad, he’s
gone again. It’s not good for the kids.” – Participant A
COMMUNITY REINTEGRATION
WORK
COMMUNITY
PERSONAL
FAMILY
Avoiding Others Finding a Rhythm in Life
Helping OthersPursuing Non-Criminal Activities
Maintaining Recovery
Being a ProviderBeing a Father
Family 's Experience of Incarceration (Re) Establishing Ties(Re)
Establishing Trust
Role Loss/Changes
Employer PrejudicesHaving Resources
Making Legal MoneyStructuring Time
Being a NeighborChoosing Invisibility
Making My PlacePlaces to Avoid
Places to Engage
Community ServicesDrug & Alcohol Treatment
Instrumental SupportsProbat ion
Timing of Supports
Considering ConsequencesMaintaining Resolve
Maintaining VigilanceSpirituality
Stigma
Community: Establishing one’s place in the community and
accessing services in the community were key aspects of an
ex-offenders reentry process. Some men intentionally moved to a
different community as an avoidance tactic. These men tended to
want to remain anonymous and invisible in their new community.
Others described participating in their old community in new ways
(as neighbors, softball coaches, mentors, etc). Most men discussed
access to services and supports that they felt were most
instrumental to their reentry. “It was hard, cause I was right back
in it. Cops, drugs, little kids running around, mothers on drugs,
no fathers around and
public housing. Geographic change wasn’t going to help me. I got
to change within myself.” – Participant C
Work: 5 of the 7 men were working and the other 2 were on
disability. Each spoke of the role being productive played in
structuring their time, keeping them out of jail, and providing the
resources they could use to provide for themselves and their
families. Some spoke of the importance of earning a legal wage.
“You work hard. Everybody is proud of a paycheck. I know mine’s not
gonna equal theirs [from selling on the street], but who
has to walk around and worry? Not me, cuz all mine is legal. All
his is illegal.” – Participant E
