Returning Home

Hundreds of men and women are released from correctional facilities in Boulder County each year.  Their families and community members hope that release will offer them the chance to start fresh and to build new lives after having served their time. But, tragically, sixty percent of them will end up back in jail…a recidivism rate that costs the community far more than the money needed to pay for prisons.  The costs are counted in broken families, lost opportunities, and misspent lives. 

A glimmer of light exists for some, however. When a person is fortunate enough to be connected with the FOCUS Offender Re-entry Program, a program of The Collaborative Community, he or she is far less likely to return to jail. The recidivism rate goes down from 60% to 16%. 

How does FOCUS manage to help stabilize so many lives? The answer lies in the heartfelt story of the organization’s founding and its careful commitment to making one-on-one connections with returning offenders. In 2001, Tania Leontov was asked to be part of a task force of nonprofi t executives and faith leaders, who had seen returning offenders coming back into the community desperate to maintain the life changes many had begun to make in jail. They often came to churches for help, and the churches did not feel equipped to meet with their many needs.  Still, several leaders from the Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist communities knew that their congregants wanted very much to do something. 

So Tania and the task force created the FOCUS program to connect volunteer mentors one-on-one with offenders coming out of jail. Mentors start working with their mentees while they are still behind bars and recognize that the fi rst 72 hours after a prisoner is released are critical – they need help so that they don’t return to their old relationships and behaviors. The volunteers help connect the former offenders to social services, when possible, and FOCUS has also helped create partnerships with businesses and landlords who will hire and house the former offenders. 

Tania talks about the challenges of working with these men and women, “They’re dealing with so much. In fact, we know that a certain percentage suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder due to their incarceration and many of them have both an addiction and mental illness to cope with.  We have to empower them to get back their lives.” 

FOCUS mentors come from throughout the Boulder community, including pastors, teachers, psychotherapists, and even an astrophysicist.  “The mentors and their mentees do simple things together, like going to the park, playing chess, or hiking,” explains Tania. “Just spending time with the mentor models socialization in a new way.” 

The success of FOCUS hasn’t gone unnoticed.  Awareness has risen dramatically regarding high levels of incarceration in certain communities and the challenges of re-entering society after prison, in part due to the work of legal scholar Michelle Alexander and her book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Program directors in eight different states have contacted Tania to ask to replicate the program. 

While FOCUS has been highly successful, the organization must raise dollars to support its work and ensure that it can recruit and train an evergrowing number of mentors to meet the need. The Denver Foundation has provided FOCUS with a technical assistance grant to write a strategic plan and wishes the organization every success.  For more information on FOCUS, visit http://thecollaborativecommunity.org.