In August 2020, Daniel Martin exited through the front doors of the Cordova Center, a residential reentry center (RRC) in Anchorage, Alaska, after announcing his intention to leave. Less than a day later, he was charged with felony escape and branded a “walkaway.” That month alone, seven other residents “walked away” from Anchorage RRCs and, like Martin, were charged with escape.
Although residents can technically leave the facilities, the harsh legal penalties for doing so demonstrate that RRCs—a type of halfway house—offer freedom in name only. Indeed, unlocked doors mean little if walking through them is a crime, as is the case for the majority of RRCs in the United States.
Halfway houses broadly refer to transitional residential spaces designed to help individuals readapt to life outside prison. Yet there is a significant difference between voluntary halfway houses and government-contracted RRCs that are mandated as a condition of parole or as part of a post-release plan. Mandatory RRCs operate under systems of surveillance and forced confinement, making them extensions of the carceral state. They are also understudied and poorly regulated, subject to fewer standards and less oversight than even most prisons. If RRCs are to ever serve their intended purpose of reducing recidivism and supporting formerly incarcerated people’s reentry into their communities, the government must not only require increased transparency and higher standards of living within RRCs, but also entirely abolish their features of surveillance and required residency.
RRCs came about in response to the United States’s booming prison population in the 1970s, as demands for alternatives to incarceration, increased community treatment options, and prison abolition rose with incarceration rates. Noting the success of the halfway houses that were first opened in the 1950s by Episcopal, Catholic, and Quaker groups, American policymakers poured millions into developing government-funded RRCs. Between 1960 and the early 1970s, the number of RRCs rose from approximately a dozen to over 2,000, with enough capacity to house nearly 65,000 residents.
On the surface, the expansion of RRCs seemed to be a victory for activists, who had pressed for decades for the government to fund community-based anti-recidivism programs and prison alternatives. But RRCs, according to ACLU Research Fellow Cyrus J. O’Brien, only looked “like opposites to prison” from the outside. In reality, they continued to surveil and control residents, expanding “the reach of the carceral state” rather than reeling it in.
Today, RRCs continue to involuntarily confine thousands of residents. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the federal government alone currently maintains 154 contracts with RRCs, which collectively house nearly 10,000 people daily. In these spaces, every individual is subject to surveillance and supervision: Their personal property is commonly searched and their day-to-day movements—even to and from work, required programs, and recreation—must be approved and monitored by facility staff.
Outside of population estimates and surveillance policies, however, information on RRCs is hard to find. This is partly because many RRCs are privatized, and the entities that fund them do not publish data on their residents or facilities. Even for government-operated facilities, the federal government has not published concrete data on RRCs in nearly a decade: The last Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities was released in 2012. Few states release policies related to RRCs at all, and the ones that do publish guidelines tend to do so with little detail. Minnesota, for example, only requires that buildings be “clean and in good repair” and bathrooms be “adequate and conveniently located” to meet administrative requirements.
Lack of oversight on even these minimal standards has left RRCs vastly unregulated and unsafe. The New York Times and The Marshall Project have both published reports citing drug use, violence, and staff misconduct in many facilities, conditions that are bound to hinder successful community reentry. Circumstances only worsened with the Covid-19 pandemic: RRCs are both high-density and semi-fluid to the outside world, causing uncontrolled disease spread among residents.
Residents suffering in these woefully inadequate living conditions rarely even reap their alleged benefits. A 2013 Pennsylvania Department of Corrections study found that 65.7 percent of people paroled to Pennsylvania RRCs recidivated within three years, compared to 61.2 percent of people paroled directly to home. Studies from across the country show that this pattern is occurring in other states as well, demonstrating that RRCs are systemically failing to achieve their basic purpose of reducing reincarceration and helping residents readjust to life outside of prison.
The horrific conditions and outcomes of RRCs, coupled with their carceral nature, beg the question of why halfway houses exist at all. Yet, while mandated RRCs have failed miserably, voluntary halfway houses, like those run by A New Way of Life Reentry Project (ANWOL), demonstrate that successful residential anti-recidivism efforts are possible. Started by formerly incarcerated activist Susan Burton, ANWOL reimagines reentry: It provides voluntary housing and support that prioritizes “successful community reentry, family reunification, and individual healing,” while simultaneously working to systemically overhaul the criminal legal system. Since its inception in 1998, ANWOL has served over 1,200 women and children by providing leadership training, educational and career opportunities, and legal and financial support to its residents—all at less than half of the cost of incarceration. This has created an environment in which an average of 8 out of 10 women meet the benchmarks necessary for successful rehabilitation. And in 2020, zero women served by ANWOL were reincarcerated, with all of them meeting the terms of their probation or parole.
Other programs focused on voluntary treatment and community-based support have found similar success. Community Bridges, Inc. operates under a mission to maintain “the dignity of human life.” By providing its residents with individualized treatment programs that can include anything from financial management to counseling and health care, it saw an 85 percent success rate in preventing recidivism for its first 49 clients. Similarly, Angela House, which provides transitional housing and support for formerly incarcerated women in Houston, reports that 87 percent of women who spend at least four months in their program “successfully transition into society after incarceration.”
But with governments dumping funds into harmful RRCs instead of programs like these, successful reentry efforts simply cannot keep up with the demand they receive. In 2019, Angela House reported that it could serve only 12 to 14 women at a time, despite receiving more than 300 applications each year.
To address the atrocious rates of recidivism in the United States, investing in voluntary, community-based programs is necessary. This does not simply mean regulating existing RRCs to improve their material conditions; it means both providing support to the millions of people already impacted by the criminal justice system, and operating within an abolitionist framework that dismantles carceral structures of mandated residency and surveillance entirely.