Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2006, $900,000)
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, nonviolent prisoners. PRI is designed to reduce recidivism by helping returning inmates find work and assess other critical services in their communities. The PRI supports strategies to deliver pre-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, nonviolent offenders.
The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections will utilize this funding to continue to build on the successes of previously funded federal grants awarded through the United States Department of Labor and Justice for prisoner reentry. This grant will help to provide alternative sanctions to released offenders in the greater Baton Rouge and New Orleans region by the reopening and advancement of two Alternative Centers that were closed as a result of Hurricane Katrina. One site will be re-established at the Orleans Parish Jail and a new site will be established at the St. Charles Parish Jail. Each of the two sites will provide 50 beds specifically for this program, in a contained "therapeutic" community setting where parole offenders are not mixed with general population, or other programs.
The goals of the project are to 1) Provide reentry 'from entry until exit' across pre and post release services; 2) Release inmates to direct community linkages with service providers (housing, employment, medical and mental health, addiction support groups); and 3) Provide 'alternative' intervention program for probation and parole technical violators-in place of immediate revocation and reincarceration. This project will target offenders within four months of release who are at least 18 years and older, has been convicted as an adult and incarcerated in a state prison or parish jail pursuant to state law, and have never been convicted of a violent or sex-related offense.
CA/NCF