Incorporating People with Lived Experience

Challenges

A throughline of the expert panel discussions was that reentry work is relational work. People returning to the community from jail are often asked to engage with systems that have failed them in the past. As one expert panel member put it: “I’ve never met a formerly incarcerated person who said Thinking for a Change saved their life, or some CEO changed their life. People remember people. We keep trying to connect them to systems, instead of people.” People who share common experiences, from jail incarceration to grappling with addiction and recovery to periods of homelessness, can connect and build trust with reentry populations in unique ways.

However, in many jail jurisdictions, a criminal record may limit the ability of people with lived experience to serve in certain roles. This can occur through restricting access to the jail facility and/or not hiring people with lived experience into staff and leadership positions. Hiring people with lived experience requires buy-in from sheriffs, jail administrators, and other leaders, since individual jurisdictions are left to decide whether individuals with criminal records can enter a jail facility. Experts noted that securing this buy-in can be particularly difficult around more sensitive areas like sex offenses on someone’s record. Jail staff may find it difficult to accept someone who has been incarcerated in their facility in a new role as a volunteer or program partner, especially if they have been incarcerated in the facility multiple times. Support of these partners in the form of good training and supervision in their new roles can help smooth over these concerns.

Supportive services must be considered when bringing people with lived experience into the role. One expert mentioned hiring someone with lived experience one year out from their release and regretting not setting them up with proper supports and emotional monitoring. Another noted that it can be important to give people time to get stable in their own reentry journey before engaging them in what can be high-pressure roles in assisting others. Sharing personal experiences about the criminal legal system can be overwhelming and retraumatizing for those with lived experience. People with lived experience playing roles such as peer support specialists should receive fair compensation for their time and barriers to their participation (e.g., transportation access should be mitigated when possible). This does not always happen. Jails can also provide mental health resources, such as connections with social workers, to partners with lived experience who might need them.

Opportunities

Expert panel members described a wide variety of approaches their agencies and communities have taken to incorporating people with lived experience into their reentry efforts, including:

• Hiring them as peer support specialists both within the facility and post release, with the goal of sustaining continuity in their involvement
• Assigning people who have successfully completed court-required treatment as “ambassadors” to work with newer people in court
• Hiring former clients into programming positions and other positions in public agencies
• Offering an onsite community college course in peer mentorship, then assigning individuals to a community-based organization or internship
• Establishing a mentoring program in which those with lived experience provide navigation and support for people dealing with their charge

With such a wide array of possible roles, an expert panel member recommended thinking about barriers to entry when determining appropriate roles for people with lived experience. This is especially important in a community that is in the early stages of engaging people with lived experience and still has barriers to that engagement in place. They further suggested beginning with positions where the barriers aren’t as great: “It might be easier to get them hired in those positions where you aren't necessarily dealing with as extensive background checks. Such as employment job specialist.”

One opportunity for people with lived experience that the experts particularly highlighted was the community health worker role, a position that meets needs common in jurisdictions across the country. The Transitions Clinic Network (TCN) has a nationally tested model involving community health workers who have lived experience and are trained to support individuals returning from incarceration. The community health workers also serve as liaisons in navigating health and social services in partnership with primary care programs. The model functions through close partnerships with local reentry and social services organizations, and it has been associated with reduced incarceration, better medical outcomes and reduced costs (Harvey et al. 2022; Wang et al. 2019). The community health worker role often requires the individual to attain certification, which can cultivate a greater sense of legitimacy with jail staff and empower the individual to build coalitions with other organizations.

People with lived experience have an important role to play in shaping the overall jail reentry strategy in a community. Finding ways to involve a broad array of people with lived experience ensures representation of diverse views and specific experiences. Individuals who have returned to the community from jail have insights that partners working for public agencies and community organizations without that experience may miss. An example of structuring this connection to reentry strategy-setting is the Community Advisory Board (CAB) for Santa Clara County’s Reentry Network, staffed by the Office of Diversion and Reentry Services, through which current and former Reentry Resource Center clients advise and guide the county’s reentry efforts.

With so many different roles that people with lived experience can play, it becomes important to communicate to reentry partners about what those roles entail so they understand the work being done by people with lived experience. This is further complicated by the fact that experiences such as jail incarceration/reentry, recovery from substance abuse, and unsheltered homelessness are all important, often overlap, but are nonetheless distinct. An expert panel member from a county that has been expanding its hiring and engagement of people with lived experience for many years described these complexities as follows: “We have had a very difficult time ensuring that our community knows that individuals with criminal justice experience aren't necessarily peer recovery specialists, but with the rise of peer recovery specialists being embedded in so many different things, they’ve been getting lumped in together. They can be one in the same, but not everyone with criminal justice experience is in recovery, and not everyone in recovery has experience with incarceration.”