Coming Home: Peer Assisted Reintegration for Women Returning from Jail

Background: Jail stays can range from hours to days, and up to a year depending on the reason for confinement. A consequence of the shorter stay with indefinite release dates is that there is less time to begin and maintain treatment regimens for inmates who need behavioral health treatments and less time and lack of knowledge about particulars related to release planning and community-based maintenance of treatments started in jail ¹. Gender differences exist in incarcerated populations with women far less likely than men to commit violent crimes, and more likely to be arrested for economically motivated crimes - burglary, prostitution, possession of stolen property, and forgery². They also suffer significantly higher rates of prior physical and sexual abuse compared to their male counterparts, as well as higher rates of mental illness, and 70% had psychiatric symptoms at the time of incarceration³. ². The Department of Justice reports that within three years of being released, 58% of studied females in the U.S. are rearrested, and 39% are re-incarcerated⁴. A growing body of literature suggests the need for gender-specific or gender-responsive strategies that address the unique needs and concerns of women, and that promote socially just criminal justice. These factors make release planning into community treatment difficult. Peers have been widely used in mental health settings⁵, have been found to be as effective as non-peer delivered services and may even contribute to better levels of social functioning⁶.

Methods: This is a feasibility study of PAR. Because this is a protected population (formerly incarcerated women dealing with mental illness) the first step was to prove the intervention would not harm their own wellbeing. PAR trained formerly incarcerated women in mental health recovery to re-enter the prisons as peer advocates who would help prepare other incarcerated women suffering from mental illness to continue treatment upon their release. Eight women participants recruited as peer advocates underwent 8 sessions of a modified psychoeducation curriculum that helped them to (1) understand their illness, to (2) understand, and role play, what it would be like to be a peer advocate, and to (3) become familiar with how the PAR program would operate in recruiting incarcerated women and linking them to community services immediately upon their release.

Results: The results were favorable, as assessed through in-depth interviews/reviews of their records/reports from our jail contacts. There were no re-hospitalizations, re-arrest, or a return to substance use. We compared this to a ten-person waitlist comparison group which did see some level of re-arrest (25%) and substance use (33%). In addition, we were able to collect data on successful service linkages the PAR team had for women leaving jail (88%).

Implications: The Peer Assisted Reintegration (PAR) intervention meets a crucial service gap that exists at the intersection of the mental health and criminal justice systems, namely providing women being released from jail a peer contact who can help guide them since their incarceration provided too short a time to create and maintain a formal MH treatment plan.