The OpenDoors Foundations program “focuses on rehabilitation with boundaries, with accountability,” said Program Coordinator Cara Cote.
Wheeler Cowperthwaite/The Providence Journal

PROVIDENCE – When women are released from the state prison in Cranston, there are few resources available to them and numerous challenges, including finding a place to live in a state dealing with a housing crisis.

One nonprofit that does provide help, including transitional housing, is getting a $715,000 grant to offer its services to help ease the transition from prison and track outcomes for those who do get help compared with those who have to make it on their own.

The federal grant OpenDoors received is meant to last three years and help women who are "justice involved," Deputy Director Dina Bruce said. That includes women coming out of prison. The money should pay for services for 100 women a year.

One of the cornerstones of those services will be transitional housing, which OpenDoors will run out of two of its facilities, including the 10,000-square-foot transitional housing complex for women and children that opened last year in a former mansion (subsequently turned into a funeral home) on Elmwood Avenue.

The grant was awarded through the federal Department of Justice's Second Chance Act program. It gives money to programs that improve the reentry from prison process.

While the program is aimed at bolstering OpenDoors' ongoing work to help people with the transition from prison, the grant also comes with a large research component.

What is the program tracking?

While OpenDoors receives the funding for its reentry program, researchers will also track the outcomes of the people in the program. Another cohort of people who aren't in the program will also be tracked to see how they do, including recidivism rates.

OpenDoors administrators have been meeting with researchers this week to put the finishing touches on who will be evaluating the program.

"Although programs like ours and programs across the country have been able to show success in a lot of ways, it has been very hard to prove scientifically that the work we are doing can keep people from going back to prison, because that is such a hard thing to accomplish long term," co-executive director Nick Horton said. "So the goal of this project is to prove it quantitatively."

Success looks like a clinical trial: The people in the program do better than the people who aren't in the program.

OpenDoors ran a similar program for men between 2013 and 2018, called 9 Yards, which served 30 men a year. It eventually ended due to a lack of funding and because of the difficulties of working inside the state prison, according to the OpenDoors website. That program saw a 36% decrease in reincarceration than its control group, according to a 2019 study by University of Rhode Island professor Leo Carroll.

Housing crisis a major stumbling block

Reams of research have shown that stable housing is a social determinant of health. Without stable housing, it is harder for people to get and keep jobs, stay healthy and live their lives.

Rhode Island is experiencing a housing crisis, as the median price of a single-family house has nearly doubled since 2019, hitting nearly $500,000, with the price of multifamily homes even higher, at $600,000. Rents have rapidly increased across Rhode Island since the pandemic, leading to an explosion in the rate of homelessness as people are pushed out of their homes, unable to pay higher rents and unable to find any housing. As one Providence City Council member put it, the market is "cutthroat."

Bruce, who is helping to run the program, knows from personal experience of how hard it is to find housing with a criminal record.

"With housing, everyone runs [background checks]," Bruce said. "Even though my charges were from years ago and I haven't been in trouble in years, it still prevents me from getting into certain places."

The transitional shelter program, which allows mothers with children to live there, provides housing for between six months and a year.

"Right now, I have two women there ... 2025 will be two years," program coordinator Cara Cote said. "And they're actively searching for apartments every single day. And it's nine times out of 10 landlord history, or, 'Do you make three times the income?'"

In most instances, the problem is that landlords won't consider child support as income or won't rent to someone with any criminal record, she said.

"We've shifted how we thought about it. ... We're never going to just discharge somebody at a year," Cote said. "If somebody's doing everything they have to for the program, they're not a problem in the house, they're working, they're doing very well, we're not just going to discharge them on the street, but we're going to meet with them more often and try to do our best to help them."

Bruce's criminal record is decades in her past, and she makes more than enough income to afford rent. Still, when she looks for an apartment, she runs into major roadblocks, despite her success.

What will make this program successful?

OpenDoors already has a track record of helping people after they get out of prison. With a goal of serving 100 women a year, administrators are looking to bolster their relationships with others in the criminal justice system to get more people help. That includes getting in front of judges, prosecutors, probation officers and defense attorneys to offer their services, and identifying when they can prevent someone from going back to jail or prison and divert them into transitional housing.

"We're already doing that, but this grant gives us the opportunity to do more work on those systems," Bruce said.

For many women, a condition of their probation will be living in OpenDoors' transitional housing program.

"I think there's a lot of times in the criminal justice system where a woman is sitting in jail facing a six-month sentence to prison that's not going to help her, and she'd be much better off and it would be cheaper for the state and ultimately help her more to deal with her addiction or whatever it is that ended her up there in the first place, to move into our transitional housing," Horton said.

Success story:After months of sleeping on the street, pregnant woman finally has a shelter bed

Part of the grant for the pilot program is to demonstrate that if OpenDoors works even more closely with the court system, they can help women make the most out of those opportunities.

"It's to try to sort of set up a different trajectory," Bruce said.

Usually women end up getting probation or parole violated for an underlying problem: drug addiction, lack of housing or other things that incarceration isn't going to help them get out of, she said.

Offering structure and life skills

For many of the women coming into the program, building life skills is paramount. The criminal justice system is punitive, not a rehabilitative reentry program. OpenDoors' Foundations program focuses on rehabilitation, Cote said.

"Foundations focuses on rehabilitation with boundaries, with accountability," Cote said. "The women do extremely well under that structured environment."

Like Bruce, Cote has her own history with the criminal justice system and is in recovery.

For Kerri Baker, who works at multiple OpenDoors facilities as a shelter monitor, offering housing means offering stability. That stability can be the biggest first step in preventing someone from going back, by taking them out of the environment and situations that led to their incarceration.

"I saw that happen a lot," Bruce said. "Even during the time that I was incarcerated. There were women that come back and forth, back and forth. Every 30 days they were in there and they, you know, you're just not going to get the services that we can provide in prison. You're not going to be able to get the support that we can give the women in prison."

For Bruce, her hope is that they can get someone into the program early enough in their addiction, with them being involved in the justice system, and get them those services.

"Hopefully that's enough to keep them on the right track," Bruce said.

Many people Bruce has seen have never had support or guidance, and some women don't even know how to take care of themselves.

"They can get all that support and learn how to do things from the houses that we have," she said.

Program to add staff

With the grant funding, the program is adding at least one additional case manager, focused on helping those in the program who aren't living in one of the two transitional houses.

Second chances and a healthy dose of peer understanding

Bruce, Baker and Cote have all been through the criminal justice system, struggled with addition issues, and found themselves on hard times.

Cote has been in recovery for 13 years. Originally from Connecticut, she was sentenced to five years in prison at age 19. She had her parole transitioned to Rhode Island after she got out of prison to get away from the scene that landed her there, and went to the Community College of Rhode Island. When it came time in her program to get an internship, she was told that anyone with a criminal record didn't qualify.

"I fought with them for a very long time until someone told me to come to OpenDoors," she said. "OpenDoors was my second chance, and I've been here ever since."

Cote said she keeps an always-on phone policy with her clients, including those who aren't in the program anymore.

"When women move in, my first line to them is – if you are struggling, call me," she said. "I don't care what time it is, because I would rather them call me before it's too late," she said.

Baker started as a client in the Foundations program before working for OpenDoors, spending seven months in transitional housing. She had a problem with alcohol, went into a detox program and then residential treatment before the Foundations program.

When problems started flaring up after she had left the program, Baker said her first call was not to her family or friends – it was to Cote.

"At that point, because of my actions and things I've done, my family has stopped talking to me, my grandkids, my kids, everybody," Baker said. "They knew I was better than that, because I had never had that problem before. So I went to Foundations. I was able to get my mind right and get myself back together."