NYS CoRR Platform Message

NYS Coalition for Rehabilitation and Reentry

LifeLine

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."
 

 1. Read, Take Pieces, & Edit the following Message: 
(or write your own)

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".

 New York State can benefit from the Canadian experience. 

I therefore recommend that:

NYS liaison with the Correctional Service of Canada ((CSC) should be started, 

to lead to the development of a NYS plan,

to inaugurate a similar LifeLine program, for all NYS  incarcerated persons serving ten years or more.

"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.