Colorado Halfway Houses Lack Accountability, Oversight

The competition for limited resources such as emergency or subsidized housing gives rise to regulations and practices that ration care. You cannot republish our photographs or illustrations without specific permission. If you’re republishing online, you must link to the URL of this story on propublica.org, include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up language and link, and use our PixelPing tag. Román Prieto’s stepfather, Ivan Rios, emailed the facility in late December asking for more information and security footage. Following the 2019 audit, Stanford said he met with the local board and the facility to discuss the audit, but he couldn’t point to anything that had been done to address the concerns beyond installing more security cameras. Advocates say transparency is necessary because boards could cherry-pick applicants who would improve their facility’s success rate, a metric now used to financially reward facilities. Rimes said he felt like he was deceiving the auditors, but believed that the potential boost in state funding from a good audit would improve conditions at the facility.

GEO more than tripled its number of facilities over the past decade or so. The WIN Recovery house in Chicago is one location trying to reform the halfway house model. They provide housing to formerly incarcerated LGBTQ+ people, especially women. Many organizations creating housing options for individuals returning from incarceration are more focused on profits than rehabilitation, and it can have dire consequences. But some advocates are working to create better stepping stones back to society.

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This distinction is important to note when discussing the legality and potential punishments for halfway house a halfway house because it applies to a specific population of individuals. Whatever their age or gender may be, individuals who have gone through addiction usually have had issues with their education or career. They might have been expelled from school or fired from their companies because of their addiction. By living in a sober environment, they will be given an opportunity to go back to school, get a new job, or become a volunteer for a cause. In some way, this therapy helps people re-enroll in certain classes and put up new career goals for themselves, applying new and better habits that they learn from their rehabilitation programs.

• With the Second Chance Act, Case Managers in the Bureau of Prisons could transfer eligible individuals to “community confinement” for up to the final year of the individual’s sentence.
• The total number of residents annually is not reported regularly, but a BOP document stated 32,760 people spent time in federal RRCs in 2015.
• As an experienced provider of services to both ex-offenders and the homeless, I see how the lack of affordable housing leaves ex-offenders competing for the same limited resources with others who have no criminal history.
• Many sober homes in Austin, Texas, provide different services to the community.

In the few publicly released reports from state-level agencies, we found a similar lack of frequency in reporting and other significant issues with oversight. In a 2011 audit from New Jersey, the state’s Office of Community Programs was found to be conducting far fewer site visits to halfway houses than policy required. The testing they performed to determine the extent and quality of services being provided was found thoroughly inadequate, and the Department of Corrections had no set standards to grade facilities on performance. Even when site visits were conducted, there was no way of authentically monitoring conditions at these facilities, since halfway house administrators were notified in advance of site visits and were able to pick and choose files to be reviewed. As such, any references to a ‘halfway house’ in this article refer to the type of correctional housing used for inmates.

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GEO Group, a Florida-based company, operates the Cheyenne Mountain Re-entry Center in Colorado Springs. Together, the three prisons hold about 3,360 of the state’s 19,668 inmates. She said she served two years and two months in the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility and one-and-a-half years on parole. She now lives in Denver and runs a nonprofit helping women transition out of prison. Our central hub of data, research, and policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in jails and prisons. Placement in Residential Reentry Centers post-incarceration can technically be declined by people slated for release, but doing so would require staying in prison instead.

Unlike prisons, the Bureau of Justice Statistics doesn’t publish detailed information about the populations of halfway houses. Furthermore, privately-run and state-contracted halfway houses release very little publically available data, making it difficult to get an accurate idea of their effectiveness. Critics feel these shortcomings could result in unsatisfactory conditions and negatively impact residents. At some point in your life, you have probably heard the term “halfway house” in relation to rehabilitation of some form.

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Many of our volunteers have created bonds that last decades, enriching the lives of everyone involved. This video features the special bond and friendship between Greg and Kevin, two participants in the Amicus program. Research demonstrates that released prisoners are often concentrated in large metropolitan areas (Lynch & Sabol, 2001). Colorado’s halfway house system was designed like many other state programs — giving local governments as much control as possible.

Appeals of disciplinary actions may be completed through the administrative remedy program. Pre-release inmates at an RRC remain in Federal custody while serving a sentence imposed by a U.S. Probation or the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency are housed as a condition of their supervision. Interested providers are provided a Statement of Work , or in some cases a Performance Work Statement , which outlines performance requirements for operating an RRC. The SOW provides detailed information about the administrative and program requirements and all other services the contractor will be required to perform.