Making the Transition

Groundbreaking study in Pitt’s School of Social Work aimed at reducing recidivism

From left: Ralph Bangs, co-investigator; Ruth Howze of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services; Dr. Bruce Dixon, director of the Allegheny County Health Department; Warden Ramon C. Rustin; Marc Cherna, director of the Department of Human Services; Michelle Zorich, research coordinator; Hide Yamatani, principal investigator; and Aaron Mann, associate researcher.

When an inmate is released from the Allegheny County Jail, he may find his newfound freedom just as unsettling and even terrifying as life behind bars.

With only the clothes on his back as he walks out of the county lock-up, a former inmate faces an enormous struggle to pull his life together. Where will he live? Will his girlfriend take him back? Can he sleep on a friend’s sofa?

Probably, he has no job prospects and no medical benefits. Research studies have shown there is an eight-in-10 chance the man has a drug or alcohol problem—and that there’s a high probability that he will be rearrested and back in the county jail within three years.

It is this group of people that Hide Yamatani is reaching out to in a new three-year study by Pitt’s Center on Race and Social Problems, part of the School of Social Work (SSW). The project, titled the Evaluation of the Allegheny County Jail Collaborative, will track, interview, and assess 300 male inmates within 30 days of their release from jail and, subsequently, every six-to-eight months.

Professor Yamatani, principal investigator for the project and SSW associate dean for research, wants to know which social services and networks the men are using, which ones are working for them, and which are not. The answers could shed some light on why Allegheny County’s prisoner recidivism rate is so high and how it could be reduced.

Initial funding for the project comes through a $330,000 grant from the Human Services Integration Fund, a group of foundations throughout Pittsburgh and Allegheny County.

“It is critical that we reach the men in those first 30 to 45 days,” Yamatani said. “If they can survive that period, they have a slightly better chance of not returning to jail.”

As the 300 former prisoners, 150 Black and 150 White, are tracked and interviewed, another simultaneous study will be under way—a thorough survey of the county’s social service agencies and how well they perform collaboratively to meet the men’s needs. For the study, “collaborating” is defined as not just cooperating, but actually working together to provide assistance, even if it means teaming up to raise more funds. On board for the study are Allegheny County’s Department of Human Services, Health Department, and Bureau of Corrections, as well as dozens of agencies that help former inmates with issues ranging from housing to anger management.

“Some of these individuals have rarely had to set an alarm clock to get to work,” Yamatani said. “Some have grown up in a house where one or both parents hardly ever worked during their childhood years. Many are high school dropouts.”

Few other institutions have undertaken such ambitious projects to track former inmates and study the agencies that help them, said Yamatani.

What makes Pitt’s project unique is that Yamatani and his colleagues also will be examining differences in the ways Black and White former inmates adjust to life after prison. Yamatani believes Black former inmates may tend to benefit more than Whites from social networks—family, friends, girlfriends—but that Blacks also may be returning to neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and higher rates of poverty-driven crimes, such as home invasions.

Yamatani added that women encounter their own specific problems upon release from prison, and he hopes to replicate the study at some point with female subjects.

SSW Dean Larry E. Davis said Yamatani’s study is “enormously important because it addresses a real problem for Pittsburgh and our society—how do we reintegrate men into our society once they have been incarcerated? It is also a problem that is laden with racial disparity in both the numbers that enter the criminal justice system, as well as the opportunities that are available to these men once released. Dr. Yamatani is attempting to assess how unique racial differences in social support may be used to reduce recidivism for both White and Black inmates.”

Allegheny County Jail Warden Ramon C. Rustin said Pitt’s study, combined with inmate services already in place at the jail, represent the most impressive programming he has seen at a county level. His facility is filled to capacity with 2,500 inmates, most of them serving two-to-five-year sentences for crimes ranging from aggravated assault to child molestation.

Pittsburgh’s prison population and socioeconomic conditions contrast sharply with those in Yamatani’s native Japan, where the poverty rate hovers around one percent and the jail in his hometown of Fukuoka (with twice the population of Pittsburgh) holds a mere 300 inmates.

In Pittsburgh, Yamatani has seen former prisoners slip back into a life of crime or drugs. It usually happens when something goes wrong, he said—when housing falls through, for example, or a girlfriend leaves. That is why Pitt’s project goal is to “envelop and surround former inmates with services, so they become more self-reliant,” Yamatani said.

“Former inmates can be some of the most victimized, helpless, and discriminated-against people in society,” he maintains. “They have a huge number of steps to climb to get to the level where society generally accepts them as contributing members. So social workers often look as though they are not making much progress. But people have to understand—we are selecting the most difficult-to-serve population, not the easiest.”

Yamatani calls the Allegheny County Jail study one of the most humanistic undertakings of his career. “My three aunts who are nuns in Japan would be proud,” he smiled. • Sharon S. Blake