The COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous impact on detention facilities across the United States. While still operating over capacity, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) has been releasing inmates to help address overcrowding in DOC institutions. But as such individuals leave DOC facilities, they are faced with yet another problem brought on by the coronavirus pandemic: lack of resources to help them successfully reenter society.
The transition from detention back into society is difficult under the best of circumstances. Over the past decade, organizations and actors in Milwaukee have begun to offer a robust package of reentry services for returning citizens. Sadly, much of that work is now on hold.
“Unfortunately,” notes Wendel Hruska, Executive Director of reentry service provider Project RETURN, “due to the pandemic we have been forced to suspend all in-person groups and most direct service with individuals.” Such programming achieves much of its success through the personal relationships fostered through in-person interactions. To Adam Procell, who oversees the Partners in Hope reentry training program at Community Warehouse, the current pandemic has “essentially dehumanized the relationship between returning citizen and reentry facilitator. This has been done by essentially eliminating most group and face-to-face type programs that help men and women successfully return back to our community.”
Coming Home to Stay
This does not mean, however, that reentry service providers have given up. As Gretchen Schuldt, Executive Director of Wisconsin Justice Initiative Inc. succinctly explains, “COVID-19 has pushed a lot of services online.” Indicative of such a migration is the example of “Home to Stay” resource fair. This event, originally conceived by the State of Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) and the Milwaukee Community Justice Council (a group made up of Milwaukee-area criminal justice agencies and local government officials) as a monthly in-person resource fair for returning citizens, faced an uncertain future when the pandemic began in mid-March; the last face-to-face incarnation of “Home to Stay” had been held at Community Warehouse’s North Side location on March 4, 2020.
According to DWD Employment and Training Supervisor John Thomas, the “Home to Stay” events had been “gaining great momentum” prior to the start of the COVID-19 crisis. Thankfully, Thomas—along with Schuldt, Hruska, Community Advocates’ Conor Williams, and students and faculty from the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE), Marquette University, and UW-Milwaukee—has been able to quickly set up an online version of the “Home to Stay” program. This easy to navigate site catalogs services available to returning citizens in such areas as food, housing, health care, and employment. To Thomas, the goal of the site is clear: to provide “a lot of information on resources, services, and employment opportunities available to this population during this pandemic.”
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As Partners in Hope’s Adam Process says, “getting released from prison and not recidivating statistically is difficult under the most generous conditions. Inmates being released today, however, are faced with odds almost impossible high to overcome. What would you do with no house, no money, no clothes, no license?” The “Home to Stay” website attempts to answer such questions by putting returning citizens in digital contact with those still providing such necessities during the COVID-19 pandemic. A website user, for example, could learn that workforce development organization Employ Milwaukee is currently providing online job-seeking assistance for returning citizens.
The coronavirus pandemic will one day end. For reentry service providers like Hruska, Procell, and Thomas, this will allow in-person activities to start up once again. Until then, the “Home to Stay” online resource directory will continue to be updated on a near-daily basis. Yet the current crisis has given those who work with previously incarcerated individuals the opportunity to rethink the delivery of the services this demographic needs to success reenter society. For many such people, it may be difficult to get to an in-person event—yet almost every returning citizen has a smartphone.
For Schuldt and other service providers, the next step will be to create a permanent “Decarceration Platform,” an online tool that allows for organizations to continue to engage with returning citizens in the digital realm. Such a tool will never replace the valuable face-to-face programming offered by the likes of DWD, Project RETURN, and Community Warehouse. Instead, it will be a complementary resource, one meant to assist those who continue to need our help, now more than ever.
