Thank you for attending a Voices of Reentry community conversation event. To learn more about reentry and explore how you can get involved, here are some suggestions and resources:
- Volunteer with a reentry service provider like our partner THRIVE Communities. There is no central directory of such organizations, so the best approach is to Google “reentry support near me”
- Explore what it means to become a “fair chance employer” via the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice or Honest Jobs. If you are employed, look into your employer’s policies around hiring people with a criminal record.
- Access to housing is another area in which formerly incarcerated people face many barriers. Learn about the exception to the Fair Housing Act that allows landlords to discriminate against formerly incarcerated people and lobby your representatives to repeal this amendment.
- Learn about a new ordinance in Atlanta that seeks to reduce housing discrimination against formerly incarcerated people. Support efforts in Massachusetts and New York to change laws that create barriers to housing access for formerly incarcerated people.
- Join the #TimeDone movement working to repeal thousands of laws that pose barriers and obstacles to formerly incarcerated long after they have served their time.
- Read Halfway Home by University of Chicago sociologist Jonathan Ruben Miller, about the long term impacts of mass incarceration on individuals, families, and communities.
- Learn more about THRIVE Communities’ restorative justice-based approach to reentry.
- Join the campaign led by Families for Justice as Healing to prevent the construction of a new women’s prison in Massachusetts.
- Arrange a screening of Voices of Reentry to start a conversation and mobilize your community. Contact us to arrange a screening of Voices of Reentry in your community.
Additional Resources
Reentry
Lucius Couloute, Prison Policy Institute. Nowhere to go: Homelessness Among Formerly Incarcerated People.
Lucius Couloute and Daniel Kopf, Prison Policy Institute. Out of Prison & Out of Work: Unemployment among Formerly Incarcerated People.
George Halfkenny with Nomi Sofer. I’ve Done My Time, I want to Work, Why Will No One Hire Me?
Devah Pager. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration.
SHRM Foundation. Getting Talent Back to Work.
Bruce Western. Homeward: Life in the Year after Prison.
U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Collateral Consequences: The Crossroads of Punishment, Redemption, and the Effects on Communities.
Mass Incarceration
Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Elizabeth Hinton. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.
James Forman, Jr. Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.
The Marshal Project: Nonprofit Journalism about Criminal Justice.
Prison Policy Institute. Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023 | Racial disparities | Poverty and debt | Financial exploitation
Voices of Reentry 