The Safer Foundation Successfully Reduces Recidivism

The Safer Foundation offers ex-offenders employment and support services, helping them become employed, law-abiding members of society. It has had remarkable success at reducing recidivism.

By Famin Ahmed, NCPC Staff

One of the hardest challenges ex-offenders have to face is finding a stable and well-paying job after their release. Many employers are reticent to hire former prisoners. A majority of ex-offenders never graduated from high school and have little legitimate work experience. The ex-offenders themselves often lack the skills to land a well-paying job and they don’t always know how to market the skills they do have when interviewing for a job. Many ex-offenders have substance abuse or psychological problems that need to be treated before they can hold down a regular job. And many ex-offenders are missing a social support system that would help them keep a job once they have found one.

For more than 30 years, the Safer Foundation has been working on reducing recidivism in more than 100,000 individuals with criminal records. Based in Chicago, IL, the Safer Foundation is considered to be one of the most successful programs at reducing recidivism. The foundation, a secular, nonprofit organization with nine locations in Illinois and Iowa, is one of the largest community-based providers of employment services that works exclusively with ex-offenders.

According to the Three Year Recidivism Study of 2006, which was conducted by Dr. Art Lurigio of Loyola University, the three-year recidivism rate for all inmates released from the Illinois Department of Corrections in 2003 was 51.8 percent. Of those ex-offenders, participants in Safer Foundation programs who received employment services and found jobs had a recidivism rate of just 24 percent. Only one in five Safer clients who got a job returned to prison within three years of release. Of Safer clients who kept their jobs for at least 30 days, the recidivism rate was 22 percent, which was 58 percent lower than the statewide recidivism rate in the same period. Of those Safer Foundation clients who kept their jobs for at least a year, the three-year recidivism rate was only 13 percent.

The Safer Foundation’s programs focus direct, outcome-based services to ex-offenders, particularly employment acquisition and retention. Ex-offender clients meet with a counselor, whose assessment sets clients up with a plan of action tailored specifically to their needs. The counselor then directs the client to appropriate services—employment services, education programs, and other support services such as substance abuse treatment and learning appropriate workplace behavior.

“What we’ve found to be most successful,” says Jodina Hicks, vice president of Public Policy and Community Partnerships, “is to work with people as close to their release dates as possible, or before they’ve been released.”

Safer Foundation provides educational and employment readiness programs to ex-offenders while they are still incarcerated through a private school operated out of the Cook County Jail in Illinois, which provides educational and employment readiness programs. Safer also uses a small-group, peer-based approach in its education skills programs and offers special case managers, called lifeguards, to help clients for up to a year after they’ve secured employment. Safer offers programs throughout various points of the system in the cycle of reentry, though 70 percent of Safer’s clients come to them of their own accord after release.

Hicks credits Safer’s success with its ability to concentrate solely on reentry issues and to work with a variety of partners. Safer also works directly with the Illinois Department of Corrections to administer secured residential transition centers to provide selected offenders a chance to transition to the community and employment before their official release. Safer administers two such community corrections centers in Chicago. Safer’s programs also include services specifically tailored to juvenile offenders and parole violators.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Corrections highlighted the Safer Foundation as a model program for ex-offenders in 1998 because of Safer’s dedication to both helping ex-offenders find good jobs but also helping them develop the mindset that will help them stay employed and succeed in life.