The Reentry Initiative empowers women in and out of prison

After five years of helping once incarcerated women transition to life outside prison, The Reentry Initiative, or TRI, looks to the future to find more ways of empowering these women. 

TRI set out under the leadership of Deborah Simmons with the mission to help women succeed after being released from incarceration, according to TRI Executive Director Emily Kleeman. However, over the last five years, the organization has expanded its services to include full pre- and post-release care and support for incarcerated women at Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. 

In 2018, Simmons yielded her position of executive director to Kleeman and became a TRI board member. 

Since then, the  organization has operated with a  small but dedicated staff, as well as volunteers and a robust internship program. It has also found a new home at Central Presbyterian Church at Fourth Avenue and Kimbark Street, allowing for an expansion of services and space for education.

TRI wants to help women feel humanized and respected and to help dispel the social stigma that accompanies incarceration. One way for that to happen, Kleeman said, is to recognize the intersectionality that often leads to the circumstances for incarceration; homelessness, poverty, addiction and trauma are all leading factors for criminal offense.

“Ninety-nine percent of people that have an incarceration on their record have some sort of trauma, some disadvantage, some challenge,” Kleeman said. “The fact that they were even institutionalized itself is a trauma. Our (judicial) system is even worse to women and the LGBTQ population.”

“I think there is a great misunderstanding what the typical offender looks like,” Reverend Joanne Buchanan said. “There’s this idea that these people are monstrous. But that’s not true, they are our family, our friends. They have lives, families, hopes and dreams, and they made some bad choices and got a little lost.”

Buchanan was a chaplain at Denver Women’s Correctional Facility for more than a decade. She wanted to continue to serve the incarcerated population after leaving her position at the prison, which led her to TRI. Since then, she’s served as a board member with TRI in the past, and is a contracted chaplain for the organization. 

In her career, Buchanan has served as a psychiatric nurse, a chaplain and a counselor, seeing first hand the issues that lead to incarceration over the past several decades.

“We don’t always understand the way we’re complicit in not helping people on the edge, how we tip them into incarceration,” Buchanan said. “There’s a cycle between homelessness, mental illness and prison. There are arrivals and departures, because we haven’t, as a society, addressed homelessness and mental health.”

Although TRI sought a new way to help, things were not always easy for the nonprofit. Kleeman said the complexities of the correctional system is one of the big hurdles that TRI had to overcome, particularly in the early days. Even with connections in Denver Women’s Correctional Facility, getting women into the program proved difficult. It was difficult to fill the beds at TRI, finding women who could be released into Boulder County also proved difficult.

When released from prison, individuals are returned to the county in which they committed a crime. According to Kleeman, one of the challenges that is already being met with systemic reform is incarcerated individuals returning to the county they were arrested in. Kleeman and her team at TRI lobbied parole boards for out-of-county placements for women who are in the pre-release program to some success.

“They’ve realized that if you arrest someone in, say Aurora, take them out for five years and put them in prison, and then plop them right back where they started, there’s a higher rate of recidivism,” Kleeman said. “They’re going right back to the community that was non-supportive.”

The Colorado Department of Corrections, or CDOC, defines recidivism as a return to prison or offender status in the state within three years of release, whether for new criminal activity or technical violations of parole, probation or non-departmental community placement.

TRI provides an alternative to halfway houses and other traditional transition programs. From working with women while still incarcerated, to providing them access to resources and addressing basic needs upon release. Part of that involves working directly with CDOC, but also judicial and legal practices at the county level.

“TRI is filling an important need for our community, by helping formerly incarcerated individuals to make a successful return to our communities” said Michael Dougherty, District Attorney for the 20th Judicial District. “It’s such a critical role, especially since Colorado currently ranks among the worst in the nation in the rehabilitation and re-entry of those coming out of state prison.”

According to data from the CDOC, 44.9% of incarcerated individuals return to prison within three years of the initial release. Data from a special report released by the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition indicates that 100% of women in diversion or transition programs in Boulder County are failing the programs or earning new charges when going through a standard halfway house. 

According to Kleeman, based on her own research and the narratives of TRI’s clients, much of the recidivism from her clientele and halfway houses comes from technical violations of parole or probation. 

The violations can be something as simple as missing a bus to work during a snowstorm and being five minutes late, when even calling to let the appropriate parties know can result in a write-up and violation. It is a challenge for women to succeed when the rules of the system set them up for failure, Kleeman said.

“You go into a halfway house and they say they have all the support, but from what we hear from our members it just isn’t there,” Kleeman said. “Case managers there say they’re helping them become self-sufficient, but the way that it’s set up is really not useful.”

For every appointment, halfway house residents have to physically check in, including between drug tests, shopping trips, job interviews. According to Kleeman, it can take one woman up to eight hours to apply for one job in a day between all the other necessary appointments as part of parole.

“A halfway house is one step lower than prison, but you’re still being monitored and recorded constantly. They aren’t being set up for success,” Kleeman said. “It’s hard for us to get in there and help our members, we wind up blocked.”

TRI’s attempts to work more closely with halfway houses in Boulder County to prevent recidivism have been met with difficulties in establishing partnerships.

“We struggle with it, and we don’t like it,” Kleeman said. “We want to partner, but maybe it’s a culture thing or issues with funding.”

In 2020, Kleeman made significant adjustments to how they help members with housing. Though they still maintain partnerships with organizations like The Inn Between, TRI helps more with housing placement and financial assistance than providing beds themselves.

“It gives (our members) control of where and how they want to live, what kind of housing they need,” Kleeman said. “We’re just giving them the financial benefit of not going into debt or having to rob Peter to pay Paul just to have a place to live.”

The post-release services for TRI members include access to clothing and toiletries at the Welcome Back Center, as well as support for job skills education, resume building and financial assistance for daily needs like transportation. The capstone to that is the Wellness Center, which provides individual and group therapeutic services for TRI members; programs include cognitive behavioral therapy, relapse prevention and other forms of counseling.

Due to the pandemic, in-person access to Denver Women’s Correctional Facility has been essentially cut off, putting TRI’s pre-release program on hold. As the world starts to open up, TRI is ready to bring that program back into the prison as soon as they’re allowed. The program helps women with life skills and mental health, including cognitive behavior therapy to better understand the choices that led to incarceration.

TRI maintains partnerships with The Inn Between, as well as Recovery Cafe and organizations like HOPE. HOPE Director of Development Kimberly Braun connected with TRI through Kleeman and Simmons and was quickly impressed by the work being done at TRI.

“With TRI the services begin even before incarceration has ended,” Braun said. “Their work is invaluable. They recognize that our judicial system is fraught with challenges that inhibit healing from trauma that these people bring with them to prison.”

Moving forward, Kleeman and the team at TRI are working to expand the pre-release program and bring in more resources for the Wellness Center. The goal is to be able to serve a greater population, to help incarcerated women in Boulder and Denver make a return to their communities with dignity and respect.

“TRI isn’t trying to make people dependent on us,” Buchanan said. “We’re trying to help them get agency and empowerment to do it themselves. We just want to walk beside them, so they know they have support.”