Research/Document Library

The Victim's Role in Offender Reentry: A Community Response Manual

This document highlights promising practices and strategies that address victims’ rights, needs, and concerns when their offenders are released into the community, and provides opportunities for offenders to be held accountable and to be successfully reintegrated into the community. In this handbook, the role of the community receives considerable emphasis. The goal is to offer practical suggestions regarding how reentry partners can become involved in assisting victims whose offenders are released — or preparing to be released — to the community. While community members are the primary audience for this handbook, justice and victim service professionals also comprise an important target audience.

The handbook begins by addressing strategies for involving community members and victims in reentry partnerships. The issue of how community is defined is addressed, along with a discussion of how community members can provide assistance to victims, in the following major areas: support, advocacy, liaison services, and public awareness. Afterward, the role of the community specific to the implementation of victims’ core rights in the offender reentry process — notification, protection, victim impact, and restitution — is articulated in the next four sections. Each core right is defined and then followed by specific recommendations for community members that support the efforts of both system- and community-based victim advocates in assisting victims and providing individual, personalized liaison services to victims of crime. The final section of the handbook describes additional promising practices to consider when addressing victim involvement in offender reentry initiatives. Appendices are included to provide supplemental information on issues discussed within the document.

Available online

http://www.appa-net.org/

Author(s)

Anne K. Seymour

Date

2001

Publisher

American Probation and Parole Association