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Issue Summary.
LifeLine is an innovative service provided through a partnership between
Correctional Service Canada (CSC), National Parole Board (NPB) and
non-government organizations. It's about long-term incarcerated persons
-- lifers -- who have successfully re-integrated into the community for
at least five years and who are recruited to help other lifers
throughout their sentences. Its mission is "to provide, through both the
in-reach and the community component, an opportunity to motivate
incarcerated persons and to marshal resources to achieve successful,
supervised, gradual integration into the community."
LifeLine has features which are unique in the treatment of lifers:
- it
involves lifers on parole assisting other lifers;
- it
encompasses a partnership between incarcerated persons, community
agencies, and government correctional services;
- it
includes several community-based agencies across Canada, each
independent of the other but who share the same
goals and are committed
to LifeLine.
LifeLine has three main components:
- In-reach
brings lifers who are on parole back into the institution to help lifers
make their time in prison productive.
- Community
services assist lifers as they leave the institution to re-integrate
into the community.
- Public
awareness helps to create support in the community by sending in-reach
workers to meet with interested groups
and others in the correctional
community. In addition, the in-reach workers carry out preventive work
such as trying to
deter youth from becoming involved in crime or drugs,
assisting in special education initiatives, and developing positive
values and role models.
Coalition Position.
-
New York State can benefit from the Canadian experience.
-
Liaison with
the Correctional Service of Canada ((CSC) should lead to the development
of a plan to inaugurate a similar LifeLine program, for all New York
State incarcerated persons serving ten years or more.
Rationale.
Long termers are a high percentage of those incarcerated in New York
State. After many years in confinement, these men and women have a
particularly difficult time to make the transition to independent,
responsible, law-abiding lives. It is only sensible to recognize this
challenge and to provide what is needed for a successful reentry, in
order to increase the probability of less crime and less ultimate cost.
In August of 1998, the American Correctional Association recognized it
as a "program of excellence"......Also, as recent as 2002, LifeLine
received the "offender management/treatment and re-integration award"
from the International Corrections and Prisons Association for the
Advancement of Professional Corrections.
"Such a program is not only practical, cost effective and humane, it is
also, and this is by far the most important consideration, the one that
provides the best long term protection for the public" National
Resource Committee Report on the LifeLine Project, 1990
See also: Transitional Reentry Services.
A summary of all 12 planks can be found at
Summary
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