Going the Whole 9 Yards To End the Cycle of Incarceration

From 2013-2018, 9 Yards provided long term intensive support to high risk offenders coming out of prison starting in prison and continuing after release as part of a randomized controlled trial. The program is funded by the Governor's Workforce Board, the Providence Dexter Fund, the RI Foundation, the RI Department of Health, the Consolidated Homeless Fund, and the Damiano Fund. During this time, 9 Yards served over 100 individuals, working with 30 clients a year. Clients started while incarcerated taking a variety of academic, vocational, and self-change classes, and if they worked hard while in prison, they received a big helping hand upon release, including six to twelve months of supportive housing.  The evaluation, below, showed that in the first year after release, the program caused a significant decrease in recidivism. It was a unique program that put established ideas into practice in a new way:

  • Most programs just work in one risk area and do not address all risk factors. 9 Yards provides a large amount of support in all risk areas, including education, employment, housing, behavioral therapy, mentoring, and addiction treatment.

  • Most programs just work in prison or outside of prison. 9 Yards provides support with continuity, working for 9 months in prison and at least 6 months after release.

  • Most programs work with the easy to serve. 9 Yards follows the well proven principle that reentry programs should work with high risk individuals, not low risk ones, to have the best chance of preventing future incarceration. The program criteria was developed to hone in on people that need support but also have the potential to succeed.

  • Most programs do not take advantage of incarceration. While incarcerated, people have a lot of time to begin the process of change. 9 Yards demands that they put that time to use and provides them the tools to do that.

OpenDoors has continued some aspects of the 9 Yards program, but had to end the evaluation component and the pre-release component due to lack of funding and challenges working within the Rhode Island prison.

A New Approach to Prisoner Reentry

Every year, people are released from prison with almost a guarantee that they will end up back inside before too long.  We know that, for whatever reason, they will not avoid reoffending, that society will bear the cost of that future incarceration and criminal behavior, and that they will, unfortunately, spend many more years behind bars.  Programs have tried for decades to stop this cycle and there have been considerable successes, but they have not been able to establish a proven model for rehabilitation--one that creates verifiable, life-long change with participants.

9 Yards is an innovative approach to this problem, and its 2017 proved that the program cut crime and prison time, reducing felony convictions by 71% and time sentenced to prison by 62% for the first year after release. From 2013 to 2017, the program has tripled in size, and in 2015 it won the Rhode Island Foundation's Initiative for Nonprofit Excellence's Innovation Award.