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Reform done right: a Chicago program demonstrates the logic of preparing prisoners for life on the outside.

Article Excerpt
Christopher Mixen, 23, looks very much like a college student in baggy cargo jeans, clean white sneakers and an oversized navy sweatshirt. His blond hair is cropped close, and his sharp, blue eyes gaze out from behind wire-framed glasses. But clipped to Mixen's shirt is a photo ID badge that sums up his adulthood thus far: ILLINOIS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS, INMATE. His mug shot stares out from beneath the shiny plastic.

Mixen is a felon serving a four-year sentence for two counts of burglary. He is one of more than 600,000 inmates--more than the population of Washington, D.C. who will be released from state and federal prisons this year. For newly released prisoners, the smallest logistical details can make or break their reintegration into life on the outside. In the Urban Institute monograph "From Prison to Home: The Dimensions and Consequences of Prisoner Reentry," researchers Jeremy Travis, Amy Solomon and Michelle Waul identify the "moment of release" from prison as one thai has been underestimated in its importance both for individuals and for policy.

This is where Mixen comes in. Unlike most prisoners, he will spend his final eight months of incarceration in a building that more closely resembles a high school than a jail. When interviewed for this story, he had been a resident at the Safer Foundation's North Lawndale Adult Transition Center (ATC) on the west side of Chicago for 12 days. Safer is the nation's largest community-based organization serving current and former offenders exclusively. The center is located in a formerly middle-class neighborhood that by the late 1980s had become infested with drug and gang activity. For a time, it seemed like the only people moving to Lawndale were the men returning from prison.

Today the prisoners are still coming here, but something better awaits them. On the corner of Filmore Street and California Avenue, a stately, wrought-iron fence surrounds a new two story building made of gray stone. Panels of brushed steel and glass adorn its front entrance. A smooth asphalt driveway wends its way past a basketball court and between newly planted trees and flowers. This is the North Lawndale ATC, one or two residential work-release facilities operated by Safer for the...