For Those Rejoining Society, a Multitude of Obstacles Persist

People who have criminal histories face a wide variety of challenges that impede their ability to get their lives on track after justice involvement. Because of collateral consequences that attach by state and federal statutes to certain offenses and last long after people have completed their sentences, many people who have criminal histories find themselves stripped of certain rights and locked out of opportunities for housing, education, employment, social services, and other necessities, such as substance use or mental health treatment.^[]Council of State Governments Justice Center, “National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction.” Due in part to these types of obstacles, which prevent them from appropriately addressing proven risk factors for reoffending (mental illness, unemployment, substance use, housing instability, etc.), formerly incarcerated individuals are rearrested at high rates.^[]For the relationship between mental illness and recidivism, see for example William D. Bales, Melissa Nadel, Chemika Reed, and Thomas G. Blomberg, “Recidivism and Inmate Mental Illness,” International Journal of Criminology and Sociology 6, no. 1 (2017), 40-51 (in study of cohort of people released from Florida prisons between 2004 and 2011, finding that incarcerated people with any type of mental illness—and especially those with a serious mental illness—were significantly more likely to recidivate than those without). For the relationship between housing stability, employment and recidivism, see Beth Huebner and Mark Berg, “Reentry and the Ties that Bind: An Examination of Social Ties, Employment, and Recidivism,” Justice Quarterly 28 no. 2 (2011), 382-410. For the relationship between drug use and recidivism, see Gerald J. Stahler, Jeremy Mennis, Steven Belenko, et al., “Predicting Recidivism for Released State Prison Offenders: Examining the Influence of Individual and Neighborhood Characteristics and Spatial Contagion on the Likelihood of Reincarceration,” Criminal Justice Behavior 40 no. 6 (2013), 690–711 (“One of the strongest dynamic predictors of recidivism is drug involvement and continued drug use”).