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| Michael Crowley |
Many offenders have completed cognitive behavioural programming that addressed their criminogenic thinking and behaviours while they were incarcerated. Living in a halfway house allows them the opportunity to practise the skills they learned. They also have the opportunity to learn to model their behaviour based on the behaviours they observe in the staff with whom they interact.
Living in a halfway house is not always easy because a resident is still constrained by rules that he or she may find arbitrary or unnecessary. Most halfway houses have shared bedrooms and bathrooms with little privacy. In some ways, it is not unlike living in a minimum-security institution, except that it is in the community. But of course, communities can provide both prosocial opportunities and negative temptations, particularly if someone has returned to their own community where their criminally minded associates may still reside, as well as their prosocial family members and friends.
In my opinion, trust is a critical component of an individual’s reintegration journey. Once a resident leaves a halfway house, for whatever reason, the staff of the house really have no sure way of knowing where they are or what they are doing. The staff must trust that the individual is going to an approved location and is not meeting old friends, for example. In turn, the staff of the halfway house need to trust that the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) will support the decisions they make, including when they believe that a resident’s risk has increased, and they want CSC to issue a suspension warrant. And finally, the board has to trust that the halfway house will endeavour to work with each resident to ensure that they have the skills and opportunities they need to continue their journey to full reintegration.
In my experience, this is somewhat different from the time I was the director of an open custody facility for young offenders in Toronto. All open custodies in Toronto and elsewhere looked very much like halfway houses and operated much the same way. But the activities of the residents were more tightly controlled, and trust was a rare commodity. For instance, if a youth was to attend school, he had to telephone the house from an approved landline by a certain time. If he went home on a weekend, we had to speak with him and his parents on arrival, when he went to bed and when he woke up.
In the same fashion, in the halfway houses I consulted with in Camden, N.J., and Philadelphia, each resident had to have a job within a week or two of arrival. And when they went to work, the agency (and the State of New Jersey or Pennsylvania) knew how long it should take to arrive, and they were required to phone in to the house within a 10-minute window of that expected time. Failure to do so would likely lead to their arrest.
In Canada, that level of supervision does not normally exist. Though when an individual is required to reside at a facility such as a CRF by the parole board because they pose a high risk, it is likely that their behaviour outside the facility will be more carefully monitored. In spite of the less stringent rules, are halfway houses successful? Statistically it is evident that they are, as individuals on day parole had a revocation rate of only 1.3 per cent in the most recent analysis. And revocations for violent offences was 0.2 per cent. Given the fact that there are about 1,400 individuals on day parole in the community across Canada on any given day, my conclusion is that halfway houses provide appropriate supervision and support to individuals who are returning to society as law-abiding citizens.
Without question, in my view, halfway houses provide a critical role in helping individuals who have been incarcerated gradually re-enter society and learn to become law-abiding and productive members of society.
This is the second instalment of a two-part series. Part one: What I know about halfway houses.
Michael Crowley has a BA from Syracuse University. He spent more than 40 years in various positions within the criminal justice system in Canada. Before retiring, Crowley was a member of the Parole Board of Canada for 21 years. Contact him at CrowleyMichael167@gmail.com.
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