Our Approach
Successful Reentry coordinates with global partners who offer leading-edge and effective content, curriculum, and training to better prepare people reentering the community after incarceration. Our group offers decades of experience in the criminal justice field focusing on the very difficult and complicated reentry process. Through its many partnerships, Successful Reentry stays abreast of leading research and resources designed to help the criminal justice system reduce recidivism for the hundreds of thousands of men and women returning to our communities after incarceration. While great progress has been made in evidence-based practice and better understanding how to more effectively assist the incarcerated population based on risk and needs, more needs to be done, especially around engagement.
Our Story
Led by Linda Connelly, a veteran from the criminal justice field, Successful Reentry has built an effective new approach to tackle the decades-old problem of recidivism across the United States. Linda has dedicated her life to the criminal justice field for the last 40+ years. She knows what works and what doesn't to help change criminal behavior, and she has relationships with experts throughout the country and the world. Linda wants to share these resources with the criminal justice field, and that is what Successful Reentry is all about.
Recidivism - By the Numbers. Recidivism has been tracked through the US Census since 1895, when it was reported at 9% … ironically, an all-time low. Since then, recidivism rose incrementally to 43% in 1984. In 1989, it crept up to 49%, where it has remained as the norm for the past three decades. With no change in nearly 30 years, we know it is time to change the way we look at this problem, re-think how we address the human and financial impact, and incite the private sector to partner with the criminal justice system to make a measured difference today. This is why Successful Reentry was launched in the summer of 2017. We have forged our charter partnerships and aggregated the best solutions, people, content and programs to allow us to create the change we believe in.
Best Practices. Best Partners. Best Curriculum. At Successful Reentry, we salute and embrace and build upon the successes to date, curriculum that has been developed, studies/research that identify successful approaches, risk needs assessments and evidence-based practice. This is at the foundation of what we offer to our customers across the United States.
Meet Our Founder
Linda Connelly is a leader in community corrections for over 40 years, who has worked with both public and private agencies in the criminal justice field, specializing in reentry, direct service, electronic monitoring, as well as program and policy development.
In 1991, Linda founded Leaders in Community Alternatives (LCA), a community based organization providing programs throughout California including residential, day reporting and electronic monitoring with case management. She has worked with electronic monitoring since its inception in the 1980’s, developing the first electronic monitoring program for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Ms. Connelly has worked at the State and Federal levels across the country to develop community programs for the criminal justice population that focus on public safety, while addressing root causes of criminal behavior. Her approach has always been in partnership with public and private sector leaders with successes that include a model for residential substance abuse treatment program for homeless parolees which changed the traditional therapeutic community treatment approach, the first rehabilitative private prison in the United States, state-of the art use of technology including the first ever 24-hour alcohol-monitoring tool with SCRAM (Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor), GPS when it was first introduced in 2006, and most recently in response to AB 109 (realignment) in California with innovative Day Reporting Center programs.
Linda is routinely relied upon for her expertise and leadership in the field, especially as an informed and impartial voice addressing such critical issues as community-based programs that reduce recidivism, Re-Entry Services from prison and jails, efficient use of criminal justice resources and electronic monitoring. Linda has long been an advocate for a more effective criminal justice system which holds people accountable and prioritizes public safety, while providing the needed tools for long term behavior change. She is active in many professional organizations focused on the issues and trends in reentry, public safety, substance abuse, and behavioral change.