TEXAS CORRECTIONS DEPARTMENT RECIDIVISM CLAIM OF ONLY 21.4 PERCENT HAS TO BE A FLAT-OUT LIE

Concordance Academy Eases the Post-Prison Transition

By Connor Smith

Barron’s Penta
December 12, 2019

Concordance Academy’s main campus, tucked in an office complex in the Maryland Heights borough of St. Louis, looks like your typical local college. Downstairs, students pack glass-walled classrooms that line the front-facing windows. There’s a lounge, equipped with a foosball table, chess boards, and other activities.

But walk up one flight of stairs and you’re in your local drugstore. Clocking in and stacking shelves in one room are former prisoners. Another room is built like a packaging facility, with folded-up boxes and products to pack.

A few weeks before, the former inmates were in the classrooms downstairs, learning life skills, coping mechanisms, and other lessons to help them transition into lives outside of prison, and make sure they never go back.

Of a sampling of 401,288 state prisoners released in 30 states in 2005, 44% were arrested again in their first year out, while 83% were incarcerated within nine years of release, according to a U.S. Department of Justice study published in 2018. That means communities spend more to battle crime, the cost of prison continues to skyrocket, and the labor market loses out on getting these workers into jobs.

In 2015, Danny Ludeman set about trying to change that by leveraging his financial skills as the former chief executive officer of Wells Fargo Advisors in St. Louis. He launched Concordance Academy, a nonprofit that helps ex-cons readjust in society after they are released from prison. Unlike other programs, Concordance doesn’t specialize in a specific service, like job placement, housing assistance, community involvement, mental health care, substance abuse services, or legal advice. The St. Louis nonprofit packages each of these services and more. “These participants are not going to make it just by receiving one or two services,” Ludeman says. “That’s why we’re holistic. They need wraparound services, and they need them for a while. No one heals in the first six weeks. No one fully heals.”

Ludeman, who is Concordance’s president and CEO, says the program is working since having accepted its first group of participants in 2016. While it may be too early to evaluate results, he said in early August that 57 of 314, or 18%, of participants going through the program had recidivated thus far.

According to the Department of Justice study, 44% of prisoners were arrested again in the first year, but the recidivism rate goes down as every year passes, Ludeman notes. The nonpartisan independent research group NORC at the University of Chicago is conducting a random, controlled trial studying Concordance, which will take about three years to complete.

The “evidence-based service model’’ was developed with researchers at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. Participants spend 18 months in the program, starting six months prior to leaving prison, and continuing for a year after that.

Ludeman first learned about evidence-driven practice while leading a local United Way campaign. He says with any philanthropy, giving from the heart isn’t always enough if donors don’t get to see real results firsthand. “And so, because of that, I wanted to make sure whatever we implemented was scientifically effective,” he says.

Concordance plans to expand initially to three states and then “franchise’’ the model to each state in the U.S. by 2027. The organization is currently working with Illinois and Missouri to secure Pay for Success contracts, in which governments collaborate with outside investors, and tying funding to success that can be measured. “It’s a leading-edge approach to funding for a nonprofit, and it ensures that the services each state is funding are actually delivering results,” Ludeman says.

He hopes Concordance will be in Kansas and possibly Virginia by 2021. “We are basically creating the franchise model. We know exactly what a location needs, what the staff needs to be, and how to train them.”

As part of the national expansion plan, Concordance has sought mostly national firms as partners, including TAGG Logistics, to employ participants, and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, which provides legal services. “Everything we’re doing has scale in mind,” Ludeman says.

Incarceration issues have vaunted into the public discourse as the U.S. jail and prison population has exploded to 2.2 million in 2016, from 329,122 in 1980, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The bipartisan First Step Act eases drug-related mandatory minimums, among other re-entry initiatives. Though ending mass incarceration has become a major theme among Democratic presidential candidates, what happens when people get out of prison is even more important, Ludeman says.

Solving this issue could reduce the strain on taxpayers, boost the workforce, and reduce crime. Though costs differ by state and type of facility, it costs an average of $32,704 annually to house federal inmates, according to the Bureau of Prisons. The average annual outlay in Missouri is $22,187 per prisoner. Though the prison population has fallen slightly in recent years, in part due to efforts to release nonviolent inmates, recidivism remains stubborn.

“The effect on predominantly minority communities has been immeasurable,” says John Roman, an economics, justice, and society senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago, referring to mass incarceration.

Researchers receive a list of people slated to be released during certain times so they randomly select those to offer the program. Those who turn down the program are still tracked to measure their progress and to compare outcomes with participants. “This kind of research takes a long time, that’s why there’s so little of it,” Roman says. “It takes patience. It’s a real investment.’’

Concordance participants are paid a stipend and attend daily classes. Concordance works with people like James, who spent 11 years in a Missouri prison before his release in May, and who, like other former inmates, faces many obstacles. (He withheld his last name out of safety concerns). James didn’t have a driver’s license, a Social Security card, or a copy of his birth certificate.

Even simple changes in technology presented challenges. On one of his first days out, he says he confused a vacuum cleaner at a local gas station for a pay phone. “When I walked over and looked at it, I started laughing at myself,” he says. “I had to get accustomed to a whole lot of things.”

James, 46, says the staff, including therapists, instructors, and case workers, and the programs at Concordance have helped him maintain his sobriety, reconnect with family, including a son and daughter, and obtain a job cleaning equipment at a local bakery chain. “I knew I needed some help,” he says. “Honestly, I knew I did. A job was very important. Keeping my sobriety was very important. Without my sobriety, I would not have a job. I would not have reconciliation with my family. I have been readjusted in so many aspects of my life through this program.’’

The academy has received support from dozens of local and national donors, including the AT&T Aspire initiative, which provides access to job training; health insurer Centene’s charitable foundation, Enterprise Holdings Foundation, and Ludeman himself. At a fund-raising event in October, Concordance raised a full $1 million.

“I thought it was a great idea,” says Centene CEO Michael Neidorff. “You’re giving people what this country was founded on—a second chance. We always say they paid their debt to society. Let’s give them an opportunity to do something more.”

The private sector has provided nearly all of the funding for academy services, but that revenue model isn’t sustainable, Ludeman says. That’s why Pay for Success is critical. He says that talks have been “extremely productive’’ and he’s “hopeful that progress will continue’’ in order to get contracts.

Ludeman says that nothing justifies a crime, but it’s important to be aware that the deck has been stacked against most ex-convicts.

“It’s just inexplicable, horrific, the experience our participants have had—pretty much all by the age of nine,” Ludeman says. “It does help to understand the horrific environments that almost all of our participants grew up in that leads to all of these different things, starting with substance abuse or mental health, to lack of education, lack of job readiness, lack of any type of family or positive supports, all the way down to the perpetual stigma of being a felon.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Concordance Academy looks like a promising program.

When you look at the nation’s recidivism rate, the Texas claim of only 21.4 percent, which is less than half of the nation’s average, cannot be true. Texas does not have a magic recidivism elixir. If Texas has a lower recidivism rate than the rest of the nation it is only because parolees receive practically no supervision. If they are returned to prison it is only because they have been sentenced by a court for committing a new crime.