Re-Entry Center, Mayor's Office of Employment Development (MOED)

Each year, more than 9,000 men and women are released from Maryland state prisons and jails and return to Baltimore communities. Almost all (90 percent) are African-American males between the ages of 20 and 40 with little more than a sixth-grade education. Their chances of securing permanent employment upon release are not promising: Statistics indicate that 57 percent of Maryland's probationers and 40 percent of its parolees and mandatory releasees are unemployed. Thus, it should come as no surprise that more than 40 percent of Baltimore's ex-offenders recidivate within 12 months of release. Although the relationship between employment and recidivism has not been clearly documented, the devastating social and economic consequences of incarcerating generations of Baltimore's African-American men are documented daily in the local newspapers and television news reports.

In October 2002, MOED created the Baltimore Citywide Ex-Offender Task Force, which included representatives from more than 100 nonprofit and community-based service providers, foundations, faith-based organizations, advocacy groups, government agencies, and businesses. During its ten months of meetings, task force members agreed that Baltimore lacked a blueprint, a comprehensive action plan, to guide the city's many partners in a coordinated approach to meet the urgent needs of Baltimore's ex-offender population. One outgrowth of the task force was the launching of a pilot program between MOED's Northwest Career Center and the Division of Parole and Probation (DPP). The program has resulted in connecting 100 ex-offenders each month to employment-related services. However, preliminary findings of a review of the program indicate that case-management services could help increase the numbers placed in jobs and linked to supportive services.

In March 2004, Mayor Martin O'Malley appointed the Baltimore Re-Entry and Reintegration Steering Committee to take the findings and recommendations of the task force and create and implement a l2-month action plan. One of the recommendations is to create a pilot one-stop center or "demonstration" center to test MOED's capacity to serve large numbers of ex-offenders.

With two years of funding from The Abell Foundation totaling $954,500, MOED created the Re-Entry Center at the Northwest Career Center. The center, located at Mondawmin Mall in the Park Heights section of Baltimore, offers a broad menu of needed transition, support, and employment-related services to ex-offenders, in a concerted effort to reduce the recidivism rate. Since opening in July 2005, over 3,000 ex-offenders have received assistance in:

• Obtaining a Social Security card and photo identification;
• Accessing health care, including substance-abuse and mental-health treatment services;
• Finding transitional housing;
• Receiving assistance in addressing child-support arrearages and record expungement;
• Addressing literacy remediation needs;
• Identifying occupational skills training; and
• Accessing employment services, including job counseling, placement, follow-up and post-employment retention services.

Overwhelmingly, the REC clients are men (81 percent), African-American (97 percent), and between the ages of 25 and 44 (62 percent). Nearly one in five served reported being homeless at the time of registration, and 42 percent did not have a high-school diploma.

The Department of Probation and Parole (DPP) has agreed to refer its clients most at risk of recidivating to the Center. The Abell Foundation has funded an evaluation that will compare the re-incarceration rates of those DPP high-risk clients who receive Re-Entry Center case management services to those DPP high-risk clients who do not receive Re-Entry Center case management services. The evaluation is designed to determine the effectiveness of this strategy in helping ex-offenders to re-enter Baltimore successfully.