Reentry 2030
A summary of Policy and Practice Guidance for the Future of Reentry, published in April 2026 by the Council of State Governments Justice Center.
The official report
Policy and Practice Guidance for the Future of Reentry
The Council of State Governments Justice Center
Published April 2026
Suggested citation from the report: Jesse Kelley et al., Policy and Practice Guidance for the Future of Reentry (New York: The Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2026).
The report states that support for the publication was provided by The Gates Foundation, with early support from the Bureau of Justice Assistance.
What Reentry 2030 is
Reentry 2030 is a national initiative launched in 2022 to improve and expand fair, effective reentry outcomes for people leaving prison or under community supervision. It works with state leaders, corrections agencies, service providers, and community organizations to set and pursue public reentry goals.
In April 2026 the Council of State Governments Justice Center published Policy and Practice Guidance for the Future of Reentry under that initiative. The guidance is addressed to state leaders, and it collects policies and practices that states can champion, fund, or implement.
The report says its guiding principles were refined in close collaboration with the Reentry 2030 Advisory Board, which includes people with lived experience of incarceration and reentry alongside agency leaders, practitioners, and service providers.
The report's executive summary opens with the scale it is responding to: more than 400,000 people return home from prison each year, and millions more cycle through local jails. The guidance notes that state level reincarceration rates are 23 percent lower than they were in 2008, while stating that many reentry supports and services remain fragmented, inequitable, and under-resourced.
We are summarizing the report here because we are building re-entry planning into our own tools. This page describes what the report says and what we think it leaves out. It does not tell anyone what they qualify for.
The seven principles the report identifies
The report is structured around seven core principles that, in its words, can foster a reentry system that is coordinated, transparent, equitable, and centered on human dignity. The practices under each heading are the report's, summarized in our words.
1. Integrated Coordination Across Courts, Corrections, and Community Supervision
The report states that reentry outcomes improve when courts, corrections, supervision agencies, and community organizations work together toward shared goals.
- Codify a multiagency body or commission that regularly assesses outcomes for the returning population and recommends improvements.
- Build intergovernmental and community partnerships so that everyone leaving incarceration gets a warm handoff, including partnerships with grassroots organizations that struggle to compete for funding.
- Provide a state identification card, a Social Security card, and other vital documents, with applications started before the release date.
- Begin a personalized reentry plan at intake, using assessment results to guide pre-release preparation.
- Engage people with firsthand experience of the justice system to provide case management and mentoring, beginning during incarceration and continuing after release.
- Use the lightest supervision approach possible, avoid requirements that impede work and reintegration, and provide structured programs that can lead to early termination of supervision for people assessed as having high needs and elevated risk of reoffending.
2. Access to Safe, Stable Housing
The report calls housing foundational, and states that without a safe, stable place to live, people leaving incarceration face barriers to employment, health care, education, and supervision compliance.
- Use a universal housing assessment to collect data on history and risk of homelessness, and establish referral pathways to matching interventions.
- Create dedicated housing specialist, navigator, or landlord liaison roles that build relationships with housing providers before and after release.
- Advance fair chance housing policies, including limits on unreasonable criminal record lookbacks and rules that delay questions about criminal history until after a conditional offer.
- Limit local crime free and zero tolerance ordinances, and supervision conditions, that restrict where people with records can live.
- Fund the short-term costs that block a move-in, such as security deposits, utility arrears, landlord incentives, and landlord damage relief.
- Analyze housing placements for the reentry population by race and ethnicity to identify patterns that perpetuate systemic disadvantages.
3. Economic Mobility and Meaningful Employment
The report describes employment as one of the strongest predictors of successful reentry, and catalogs the legal, structural, and societal barriers that block access to stable work.
- Review mandatory collateral consequences and convert them into discretionary ones where possible, with a presumption in favor of hiring or licensing and procedural safeguards.
- Require licensing boards to apply a direct relationship test between the underlying offense and the duties of the specific job or license.
- Prepare people for work before release, including basic technology skills, resumes, interview practice, interview appropriate clothing, and assembled documentation of every certificate, degree, and skill earned.
- Hold in-person and virtual job fairs inside correctional facilities, and recruit employers who already hire people with records to talk with other employers.
- Reduce the debt that follows people home by pausing child support during incarceration, eliminating supervision and program fees, and ending interest on legal financial obligations.
4. Pre- and Post-release Educational Opportunities
The report describes education as one of the most transformative tools available during and after incarceration, and focuses on removing the barriers that limit access and retention.
- Lift statutory and administrative funding restrictions that keep incarcerated students, and people in the community with a record, from career, technical, and postsecondary education.
- Remove requirements to disclose current or past justice involvement on applications to state funded community colleges and universities.
- Ensure that programs offered in prisons lead to industry recognized credentials, chosen with labor market needs and state licensing barriers in mind.
- Put articulation agreements in place so that credits and credentials earned inside transfer into community degree programs.
- Allow parole granting agencies to consider postsecondary progress when deciding on early release after a person completes their mandatory sentence, and to accept education in place of parole conditions that require employment.
5. Comprehensive Health and Behavioral Health Treatment and Care
The report addresses people caught at the intersection of behavioral health and the justice system, and focuses on continuity of care across custody and community.
- Implement universal mental health, substance use, and homelessness screening at booking, with timely clinical follow up.
- Suspend rather than terminate Medicaid enrollment during incarceration, and automate reinstatement at release.
- Apply for Medicaid waivers that allow pre-release coverage, and build connections to community providers before the release date.
- Employ community recovery centers and recovery coaches, and train reentry staff to identify trauma and co-occurring conditions.
- Give agencies plain language guidance on what information can and cannot be shared, consistent with federal and state privacy protections.
6. Strong Families and Social Networks
The report treats family and social bonds as essential rather than optional elements of reentry, and cites research that maintaining connections during incarceration improves outcomes after release.
- Remove or reduce the cost of phone calls for people who are incarcerated.
- Offer free and accessible transportation and lodging support so that children and families can visit.
- Provide child friendly visiting spaces, extended family visits, and virtual reading and homework activities, while maintaining in-person visits.
- Train correctional officers on parental incarceration and trauma so they are better equipped to work with parents and supervise visits.
- Let families define what family is, recognizing that people who are not blood relatives often play a parental role.
7. Access to Relief Mechanisms to Mitigate Barriers
The report describes sealing, expungement, and certificates of relief as ways to move forward without a past conviction continuing to limit opportunity, and notes that access to these tools is often narrow, procedurally complex, or prohibitively expensive.
- Create or expand long-term relief such as automatic sealing and expungement.
- Expand eligibility by reducing waiting periods, widening the list of covered offenses, and revising limits based on multiple convictions.
- Create or expand certificates of relief, which the report describes as judicial orders that convert specified mandatory consequences into discretionary ones.
- Limit the barriers to non-automatic relief, including filing fees, complex petition processes, extensive documentation, and hearing requirements.
- Write relief statutes so their effects are clear, including that decision makers may not inquire about cleared convictions.
Where the report tells states to start
A short companion document, Roadmap to Reentry: 3 Things States Can Do to Get Started, also published in April 2026, distills the guidance into three actions and describes them as requiring a whole-of-government approach.
Set a big goal.
The roadmap asks state leaders to look beyond recidivism as the measure of success, and to set at least one goal related to economic mobility, housing, or health care. Its sample goals are written as population level percentages with a target year.
Scale up an exceptional program.
The roadmap suggests identifying a program already showing results in the state and expanding it statewide. It names the fundamentals to scale: vital records access, health care continuity, housing linkages, employment readiness, financial stability supports, and warm handoffs that guide people through their first 48 hours in the community.
Evolve the approach to reentry.
The roadmap offers three guiding principles. Reentry is human centered when the perspectives of people who have gone through it shape the design. It is coordinated when leaders across systems and levels of government are fully engaged. It is transparent when states set public goals and report regularly on progress.
What we think the report leaves out
This section is our own analysis, not a finding of the CSG Justice Center. Where we say the report does not cover something, we mean that we searched the published text of the guidance, its executive summary, and the roadmap, and found no mention of it. Text carried only inside images or charts would not appear in that search.
Executive clemency is not part of the relief chapter
The report's relief principle names sealing, expungement, and certificates of relief, all of which act on the record of a past conviction. We found no mention of clemency, commutation, or pardon in any of the three documents. For someone serving a long sentence, record relief mostly begins to matter after release, while clemency is the mechanism that can change the sentence itself. In our experience a release plan is also often part of what a clemency board asks to see, so in practice these are often the same conversation.
It is written for state leaders, not for the person coming home
The report says it outlines policies and practices that state leaders can champion, fund, or implement, and it defines state leaders as agency heads and elected officials. Nearly every recommendation is therefore something an institution does. The translation layer, which document to request, which office to ask, and how far ahead, is missing by design, and it is the layer people and families actually need.
People with convictions classified as violent are not addressed
No practice in the report is written for people whose convictions are classified as violent. The two examples that name an offense class are both scoped to nonviolent offenses: the cited Georgia accountability courts are described as alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent people, and the cited Colorado sealing law automates sealing for eligible nonviolent offenses. The report never says its practices stop there. It also never says otherwise, and in our experience the people serving the longest sentences are the most likely to carry those classifications.
Tribal governments are not in the coordination principle
The roadmap's coordination principle describes engagement across service systems at the federal, state, and local levels. We found no mention of tribal nations in any of the three documents. Tribal governments run their own reintegration programs, and for a citizen of a nation those programs can be an entirely separate system from the state's. A coordination framework that stops at the state line gives a state no instruction to build that handoff.
Restitution sits outside the debt practices
The report's debt practices pause child support during incarceration, eliminate supervision and program fees, end interest on legal financial obligations, and stop referrals to private collection agencies. Restitution appears three times, and each time as a carve-out or a condition. The Washington law it cites ends interest only on non-restitution obligations, though the same bill also lets a court waive or reduce interest on the restitution portion, and the Georgia early termination law it cites counts paid restitution among its conditions. No practice named in the report reduces restitution principal, which for many families is the largest balance on the account.
Overdose risk at the moment of release is not named
Substance use treatment runs throughout the health principle, but we found no mention of overdose, naloxone, or medication for opioid use disorder in any of the three documents. The medication language stays general, for example to ensure medication continuity. Continuity is hardest to hold in exactly the days the roadmap assigns to the warm handoff, so we would want a release plan to name these specifics rather than imply them.
Civic participation appears once, in the executive summary, with no practice behind it
The executive summary says relief mechanisms remove lingering barriers that limit opportunity and civic participation. That phrase appears once, in the summary. We found no mention of voting anywhere in the three documents, and the full guidance's relief chapter contains no practice about civic participation. Restoration of voting rights is one of the questions families ask us most often, and a reader of the summary could reasonably assume the full report covers it.
Records access is framed for agencies, not for the individual
The health principle asks for plain language guidance on what information agencies can share with each other. We found nothing addressing a person's access to their own records. Documenting program completion, work history, or medical care is exactly what a parole or clemency file requires, and people routinely cannot obtain their own paperwork.
The report names a knowledge barrier without proposing a way to close it
Among the barriers to non-automatic relief, the report lists a lack of knowledge about the availability and effect of relief. That is an accurate diagnosis, and it is the one barrier on its list with no corresponding practice. Fee waivers and simpler petitions do not help a person who never learns the pathway exists. Notice, in plain language, at a moment when it is useful, would be its own intervention.
Language access is not addressed
We found no mention of Spanish, interpreters, or translation in any of the three documents. The report does care about being understood: it asks for plain language guidance between agencies, and for transitional services so that all individuals can understand system requirements. Both assume the reader of that plain language reads English, and every practice that depends on someone understanding a form inherits that assumption.
How to use this page
This page describes what the CSG Justice Center's guidance says and what we think it leaves out. It is general information about public policy. It is not legal advice, and it does not describe what any particular person qualifies for, will receive, or is entitled to.
Every program named in the report is a real program, law, or policy somewhere. The report's examples come from state, local, and national efforts, and some are run by nonprofits or the federal government rather than by a state. We found no mention of Oklahoma in any of the three documents. Treat these as practices that exist somewhere and can be asked about by name, not as services available to any particular reader. Each program is run by the agency or government that operates it, and each of those decides who it serves.