Home      Login

Abstract: 

As this issue goes to press, the media is full of discussions about immigration and the reception or non-reception of Syrian refugees. Another equally challenging image is the continuous flow of prisoners who are released into our communities each month—with few resources available—not to “home,” but to shelters or other forms of temporary housing that are a far cry from any notion of home. Viewing the media coverage of the refugee crisis and the various efforts being undertaken to allow refugees to enter countries in Europe, Canada, and the United States, I was struck by the amount of preparation and effort that was being applied to providing assistance and support through the various stages of the immigration process, while the response to the thousands of citizens returning from periods of imprisonment appears to have less community support and to be less well planned. Although the prison experience may well have punished individuals for their crimes, it has done little to prepare them for returning to the community. This commentary explores the challenges facing community corrections providers in meeting the needs of released prisoners and the communities to which they return, and attempts to determine whether the methods used by agencies working with refugees and immigrants might provide us lessons for assisting released prisoners with their integration into the community as productive citizens who feel at home, maybe for the first time. Although there are differences between these two groups of people, they seem to go through a similar process of entering into a community, settling in, establishing themselves, and finally integrating into the community and shedding their refugee or prisoner identities.

Keywords: Refugee and reentry crises

Affiliations:  1: Journal Editor.