In order to design and implement re-entry initiatives that meet the needs of returning prisoners, as well as the public safety concerns of the communities at risk, policymakers must identify the characteristics of the re-entry population. Understanding the nature and needs of this population will inform a program's strategy, services, and service delivery methods, increasing the program's effectiveness.

Re-entry populations are not all alike. Recent prisoner re-entry studies in Maryland and Illinois, for example, reveal significant differences between the two states with regard to a variety of individual characteristics, including the percentage of released prisoners who are under supervision and the percentage of individuals with a history of gang participation. ^[1]   Both of these characteristics have important implications for re-entry planning. For example, some re-entry efforts have chosen to focus solely on the population of prisoners who are not released under any form of supervision, based on the belief that these individuals are less likely to have access to resources that might help them successfully reintegrate. Likewise, a knowledge of gang affiliation and participation among released prisoners may help to pinpoint those who are at greatest risk of committing violent crimes after release, suggesting a different type of re-entry intervention for that subgroup than for the general population of releasees.

Many other characteristics should be considered to provide context for important policy decisions involving prisoner re-entry initiatives. The following list comprises some of the most important factors that can be quantified among the population of individuals released from prison or jail in a given locality.

• Demographics (e.g., age, sex, race/ethnicity, marital and family status, children)
• Criminal histories (e.g., prior convictions and incarceration, length of incarceration, revocation patterns)
• Health (e.g., mental and physical health issues, including chronic and communicable diseases)
• Substance abuse (e.g., type of substance, level of abuse, treatment history)
• Levels of Employability (e.g., work history, education levels, skills, training)
• Housing needs (e.g., family size, accessibility)

Many of the data elements listed above can be obtained from state departments of corrections, which maintain data on every individual released from their system. Re-entry development teams should request department of corrections information on those individuals released in the most recent calendar year to ensure a current and accurate data set. Developers of a re-entry initiative may wish to request a list of all data items that the department of corrections maintains in its release file, in order to select the categories of information that they expect will be useful to them. Alternatively, they may negotiate to receive a "data dump" of the entire file, which may be easier and less resource-intensive for the department of corrections to provide, resulting in a more prompt delivery of the data being requested.

Developers of a re-entry initiative should also consider reaching out to social service and health agency sources, as these databases offer extremely important population information. For example, state health, human services, or other agencies may be working with the same families and populations as the corrections agency. Useful data from these sources might include information on released prisoners who are homeless, who have sought and received substance abuse treatment, or who are living with HIV/AIDS.

Agencies asked to share information on overlapping sets of individuals served should be engaged as equal partners in the development of any re-entry initiative. (See Policy Statement 1, Encouraging Collaboration Among Key Stakeholders, for discussion of identifying and partnering with a comprehensive range of affected people or groups.) Such engagement may serve to counter resistance to information-sharing from agencies that have not previously considered re-entry among their concerns; efforts should also be made to help these agencies appreciate the extent to which their own goals and missions may be served by successful re-entry initiatives. (See Policy Statement 3, Incorporating Re-Entry into Organizations' Missions and Work Plans, for more on identifying such mutual interests.)

Ideally, re-entry policymakers should foster relationships with information providers that support ongoing data collection and facilitate assessments of and improvements to the re-entry initiatives that are implemented. In the course of developing such partnerships, it is important to establish data sharing mechanisms and protocols that ensure the confidentiality of the data and establish the conditions by which the data may be reported and disseminated. GIS data sharing agreements are formal, written licenses that grant participating agencies free or at-cost access to data collected by the other participating agencies, in exchange for contributing their own data sets. Such agreements have been executed in a range of localities, including the states of New York and Utah and metropolitan Minneapolis/ St. Paul. ^[2]   The parameters of access and the obligations of the members to maintain confidentiality are documented in such agreements. Policymakers should recognize that aggregate information must be properly stripped of identifying information to meet these obligations and to avoid violating federal and state or local privacy laws. (See sidebar, Data Confidentiality Issues and GIS Data Sharing Agreements, in Recommendation c, for additional discussion of privacy and data sharing agreements.)