Better-coordinated help for people being discharged from prisons and medical facilities is a major focus of District plans for money from the federal economic stimulus bill.
The District is slated to receive $7.5 million for homelessness prevention efforts under that legislation, formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The stimulus package is providing about $1.5 billion for federal and other homelessness prevention programs across the country.
As described in the District’s proposal for its Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program, the D.C. Department of Corrections has established a program to work with incarcerated people, within 48 hours of their admission, on planning for their release. The initial steps cover areas such as health care, housing, food and job training, the proposal says.
The corrections department is expanding the current program in a number of ways, including its work on substance abuse, the paper says.
Laura Zeilinger, the deputy director for program operations in D.C.’s Department of Human Services, said in a May 8 interview that there already had been “a great deal of work” on preparing people for everyday life once they leave jail or another institution. But the new money means the District can help multiple agencies become better prepared to help people deal with the challenges they often face upon release, Zeilinger said.
Housing can be one of those challenges, and even the most well-intentioned planning for post-discharge life “often falls apart” if a person is released from an institution and dropped off at a nights only homeless shelter, she said.
The intensified focus on providing housing for people newly released from institutions does not necessarily mean “we’ll have an apartment waiting when they come out,” Zeilinger said, but it is designed to “minimize the length of homelessness.”
The proposal includes people coming out of foster care, hospitals, jail or prison, psychiatric or substance abuse treatment facilities, and publicly funded stays in hotels and motels in its definition of an “institutional setting.”
Zeilinger also said the program is not exclusively focused on correctional institutions. St. Elizabeths Hospital and other medical institutions are also part of the effort, she said.
The D.C. government has a deadline of May 18 for submitting its spending plan for the federal stimulus funds to the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development. The District’s Department of Housing and Community Development held a public hearing on the plan April 29; the deadline for comments was May 6.
