Young, Black man standing in the sun looking to the distance with the shadow of a chain link fence on his face.
Returning 
and Healing

Recommendations for Rape Crisis Centers 
Working with Sexual Violence Survivors 
Coming Home from Incarceration

Boston Area Rape Crisis Center logo
National Resource Center for Reaching Victims logo
Helping those who help othersHelping those who help othersThe National 
RESOURCE CENTER for REACHING VICTIMS
Lead Authors: 
Dave Rini Incarcerated Survivor Support Program ManagerBoston Area Rape Crisis Center Suri Roth-KatzIncarcerated Survivor Support Program CoordinatorBoston Area Rape Crisis CenterNOTICE OF FUNDINGThis report was produced by the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center under award #2016-XV-
GX-K015, awarded by the Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. 
Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations 
expressed in this report are those of the contributors and do not necessarily represent 
the official positions or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
NOTEPhotos depict models and are for illustrative purposes only.
AcknowledgmentsA special thanks to all of the organizations that have produced documents or shared 
findings on similar issues, including Black & Pink, EPOCA, Family Matters, Bethany 
House, Prisoners Legal Services of Massachusetts, Community Resources for Justice, and 
Just Detention International.


Table of Contents

Introduction 3Returning and Healing (RAH) Project 5Rape Crisis Centers Should Play a Bigger Role in Reentry 12Findings from Returning and Healing 18Finding 1: Powerlessness and loss of control are defining 
characteristics of both incarceration and sexual violence 20Finding 2: Survivors use whatever coping techniques 
they can to survive prison 24Finding 3: Reentry causes a huge amount of anxiety28Finding 4: The reentering population doesn’t seek 
services from rape crisis centers32Road Map to Serving Returning Survivors 38Phase 1: Preparation 391.Build internal capacity to work with formerly incarcerated survivors392.Learn about the challenges of reentry in your community423.Conduct outreach to let your community know you can provide services46Phase 2: Serving clients successfully 491.Build rapport with formerly incarcerated people492.Enhance client services53Phase 3: Maintaining a strong reputation 561.Build sustainable relationships with a network of providers 56Appendix 1: The Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC) and the 
Mayor’s Office of Returning Citizens (ORC) 61




In 2003, Congress unanimously 
passed the Prison Rape Elimination 
Act (PREA) and shone a light on a huge 
population of sexual assault survivors 
who’d been left out of the sexual violence 
prevention movement. There were many 
reasons why these survivors weren’t 
receiving the services they needed: 
prisons are complex institutions that 
can be difficult to understand for people 
who don’t work in them; working with 
survivors who are particularly hard to 
reach (like those who are incarcerated) 
can be resource and time intensive; and 
many correctional facilities are in rural 
locations that can be hard to reach and 
serve. But 95% of prisoners come home, 
and they still weren’t receiving the 
support they needed.

Of more importance, though, is that 
people who are incarcerated are not 
viewed by the wider culture as victims 
or survivors. “The public seems to care 
less about the stories of incarcerated 
survivors than others . . . and does not 
work as hard to end their abuse or 
the normalization of abuse in prisons,” 
writes Jo Yurcaba in Rewire.News.1 In the 
mainstream sexual violence prevention 
field, prisoners have not been a major 

focus of attention until recently. The 
movement’s roots lie with primarily 
women-focused organizations that 
looked to vocalize the tremendous 
amount of violence that women faced 
—and it had a powerful and long-lasting 
impact. However, the movement’s 
starting conceptions about who 
commits sexual violence, and who is 
affected by it, created an equivalently 
long-lasting trend of separating people 
into either victims or perpetrators, 
with those categories being separate 
and unique. These assumptions fueled 

People who are 
incarcerated are not 
viewed by the wider 
culture as victims or 
survivors and do not 
receive the support 
they need when they 
return home. 

1 Jo Yurcaba, “For Survivors of Prison Rape, Saying ‘Me Too’ Isn’t an Option,” Rewire.News, January 8,2018, https://rewire.news/article/2018/01/08/survivors-prison-rape-saying-isnt-option/. 
policy objectives and became legal 
guidelines. Until 2016, rules surrounding 
the funding for direct victim services 
provided nationally to all states and 
territories through the Victims of 
Crime Act (VOCA) also played a role in 
fueling this dichotomy, by prohibiting 
funding being used to serve incarcerated 
survivors. Though this prohibition was 
removed through a comprehensive rule 
change released by the Office for Victims 
of Crime in 2016, stereotypes and other 
barriers within funding practices and 
designation of service providers remain.

This framework, and the often 
heteronormative assumptions about 
violence that went with it, has made it 
difficult to see incarcerated survivors 
as victims of crime. The movement 
is making progress, but slowly. The 
passage of PREA (along with many other 
significant changes in policy, advocacy, 
and research) highlighted just how huge 
the service gap is for this population, and 
the VOCA rule change in 2016 allowed 
funds to be used to support certain types 
of programs for incarcerated survivors. It 
is becoming less tenable to hold on to the 
old perpetrator/victim dichotomy. This 
tool kit is an attempt to further close that 
service gap and accelerate that progress.

There are reasonable concerns about 

starting this work: First, the correctional 
world can be confusing and complicated 
to work with. Many rape crisis center 
staff might be survivors of interpersonal 
violence themselves and be quite 
rightly concerned about the prospect 
of working with people they consider 
to be perpetrators. There are ways to 
address those kinds of safety concerns 
that don’t involve putting staff in danger. 
Second, there are resource concerns, but 
there are more resources available now 
since the VOCA rule change in 2017, and 
some of the recommendations in this 
document are a fairly light lift. 

Third, many formerly incarcerated 
survivors face barriers that are not 
specific to just sexual violence or just 
violence in prison. People coming home 
from prison and jail have 
often experienced various forms of 
violence, neglect, and trauma at rates 
that exceed the general population.2 
These challenges will often require 
support from multiple agencies and put 
pressure on rape crisis centers to form 
partnerships with service providers with 
which they have not previously worked. 
Still, the rate of sexual trauma in the 
incarcerated population is incredibly 
high, and few other types of agencies will 
be as well placed to help reentering 
clients address sexual trauma as rape 
crisis centers are. 

2 Gergõ Baranyi, Megan Cassidy, Seena Fazel, Stefan Priebe, and Adrian P Mundt, “Prevalence of Post-
traumatic Stress Disorder in Prisoners,” Epidemiol Rev. 40, 1 (June 2018): 134–145, published online 
March 2018, available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5982805/.
Returning and 
Healing (RAH) Project

Funded by the National Resource Center 
for Reaching Victims (NRC)3, the project 
is a collaboration between the Boston 
Mayor’s Office of Returning Citizens 
(ORC), which is Boston’s municipal 
reentry agency, and the Boston Area 
Rape Crisis Center (BARCC), specifically 
its Incarcerated Survivor Support 
program (ISSP). This project funded the 
creation of this tool kit to prepare rape 
crisis centers to work with formerly 
incarcerated survivors, and a training 
curricula for reentry agencies to help 
inform their staff on sexual violence.

Genesis of the project

When PREA was passed in 2003, it 
highlighted a population facing high 
rates of sexual violence and who had 
little support from traditional victim 
services. Over the past 16 years, a 

number of agencies have started 
to mobilize to provide services for 
survivors in detention. Part of that 
movement happened because PREA 
mandated correctional agencies create 
partnerships with victim services 
agencies,4 but also because funding 
and resources became more available 
to ensure it was sustainable. Rules 
prohibiting rape crisis centers from 
receiving funding under VOCA for work 
with incarcerated people were relaxed 

³ A project of the Vera Institute for Justice⁴ While PREA has certainly made some progress, especially in ensuring that prisoners have access to support agencies outside of the correctional world, a number of prison-advocacy agencies and 
government watchdogs have criticized PREA implementation for moving too slowly, lacking any 
substantial enforcement mechanism, and being co-opted by the correctional system as a method for 
punishing prisoners (especially LGBQ/T prisoners) for consensual relationships. While PREA is a useful 
tool for ensuring some amount of access to services for incarcerated survivors, it has not yet proven 
capable of substantially reducing the rate of sexual trauma this population experiences. See Lena 
Palacios, “The Prison Rape Elimination Act and the Limits of Liberal Reform,” Gender Policy Report, 
February 17, 2017, https://genderpolicyreport.umn.edu/the-prison-rape-elimination-act-and-the-
limits-of-liberal-reform/, and Derek Gilna, “Five Years after Implementation, PREA Standards Remain 
Inadequate,” Prison Legal News, November 8, 2017, https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2017/
nov/8/five-years-after-imple-mentation-prea-standards-remain-inadequate/.
Rules prohibiting rape 
crisis centers from 
receiving funding under 
the Victims of Crime Act 
(VOCA) for work with 
incarcerated people 
were relaxed in 2016.


in 2016.5 While there are still concerns 
about how many incarcerated survivors 
have realistic access to rape crisis centers 
while inside the walls, the trends look 
promising. 

That trend stalls when prisoners start to 
head home, though. Returning survivors 
are substantially underserved by rape 
crisis services. Over the course of three 
years of working with incarcerated 
survivors, ISSP started to see people with 
whom we’d formed relationships and 
provided services heading home. As they 
looked at their reentry plans, some of the 
returning survivors told us they didn’t 
have any realistic options for services on 
the outside. This was a population that 
was not getting referrals to rape crisis 
centers from the inside and didn’t know 
how to connect with them on the outside. 

While many returning survivors in our 
service area did not know about BARCC, 
some of them were connected to one 
of several reentry agencies around 
Boston. These agencies serve as primary 
points of contact for returning citizens 
and help organize and facilitate their 
access to service providers. This is where 
the partnership with ORC comes in—
although Boston has several agencies 
that work in the reentry space, we 
had no municipal office dedicated to it 

until ORC was created in 2017. ORC’s 
leadership wasted no time in building 
community connections and word-of-
mouth referrals, to the point where ORC 
is broadly recognized by the population it 
aims to serve. 

BARCC and ORC started communicating 
early in ORC’s existence to find ways to 
partner with each other. Ultimately, the 
goal is to create a durable, long-lasting 
partnership through which ORC helps 
connect returning citizens with sexual 
violence in their history to BARCC, and 
BARCC provides the service and support 
so many reentering survivors have not 
historically received. 

Listening sessions were 
held with formerly 
incarcerated clients 
and allies. During these 
sessions, topics like 
anxiety and stigma 
became the main focus. 


The project work

The work of the RAH project focused 
primarily on creating a relationship 
between ORC and BARCC and 
convening listening sessions of formerly 
incarcerated consultants. Throughout 
2019, BARCC and ORC convened 
four listening sessions with formerly 
incarcerated clients and allies who 
had worked with ORC: three women 
and five men. These consultants were 
recruited and selected by ORC. Each of 
the listening sessions also involved ORC 
and BARCC staff. The listening sessions 
were roughly 90 minutes, although two 
of them ran closer to two hours. At the 
beginning of each of the second through 

fourth listening sessions, BARCC staff 
summarized the previous session to 
ensure we captured the information 
correctly. Not all of the consultants 
identified as sexual violence survivors, 
but all indicated that they witnessed 
sexual violence, and they were aware of 
its presence during their time inside.

The first session focused on how 
returning people selected the service 
providers (broadly, not specific to sexual 
violence) with which they would work as 
they made their reentry plans. This 
session focused on topics like awareness, 
trust, and finding resources. 

The second and third sessions deepened 
the conversation about finding service 
providers, but also turned toward 
general barriers reentering people face. 
During these sessions, topics like anxiety 
and stigma became the main focus. These 
two sessions were split into one session 
for the issues that women face, and one 
for men.6 Our consultants self-identified 
into whichever session they wanted to 
attend, although our experience in this 
project was that the concerns were more 
universal than we thought. 

The end result of the 
listening sessions 
was to create this tool 
kit to prepare rape 
crisis centers to work 
effectively with formerly 

incarcerated clients. 

6 This division was based primarily on the way that the correctional system divides prisoners into male and female. Facilities do not always have similar levels of support for things like reentry across male and 
female sites, and we wanted to capture any nuance that was important in that difference.
7
In the final session, we discussed how 
reentry agencies should ask about sexual 
violence such that returning citizens 
don’t feel awkward, uncomfortable, 
or singled out. We discussed several 
questions about sexual violence as well, 
to get direct feedback on specific 
wording. Much of the learning presented 
in the following sections comes from the 
feedback provided by the consultants 
during these listening sessions. 

Because we had limited time with the 
consultants, however, and we recognized 
that they could only speak to their own 
experiences, BARCC staff also discussed 
our findings with other preexisting 
organizations of formerly incarcerated 
people for additional context. BARCC’s 
ISSP staff also joined a Vera Center for 
Justice learning community for agencies 
and practitioners who work at the 
intersection of healing, incarceration, 
and reentry, and had the chance to 
discuss some of these findings with that 
group. 

We also held a two-session workshop 
with agencies that provide other types of 
services for reentering people (not 
sexual violence support in particular), in 
conjunction with the Family Matters 
program run by the Suffolk County 
Sheriff’s Department. In these sessions, 

we asked providers operational 
questions about how they work with 
returning people. Insight from these 
sessions helped shape several of the 
recommendations in Section III, about 
preparing to work with a returning 
population.

The end result of all of these sessions was 
to produce a training for reentry 
agencies about how to screen for sexual 
trauma in their clients, and this tool kit to 
prepare rape crisis centers 
to work effectively with formerly 
incarcerated survivors. 

How to use this tool kit

The intended audience for this portion of 
the tool kit is mainstream rape crisis 
centers that are aiming to better serve 
survivors who have had experience with 
the correctional system. This document 
assumes that readers have a certain 
understanding of sexual violence and the 
impacts of sexual trauma. 


The report is organized into 
three major sections: 

1)The first section provides foundational 
information about incarceration in the 
United States and why rape crisis centers 
should be working specifically with 
formerly incarcerated people based on 
the prevalence of sexual trauma in the 
population. 

2)The second reports findings from the 
Returning and Healing Project and 
includes implications for a rape crisis 
center’s practice. 

3)The third section provides a road 
map for how a rape crisis center can 
prepare to effectively serve returning 
survivors. It includes broad, structural 
recommendations to help rape crisis 
centers build the knowledge and 
infrastructure to work with these 
survivors, as well as more granular 
recommendations for client practice once 
an agency is ready to welcome them.

A note on language

Throughout this document, we’ve used 
the term survivor to reference anyone 
who has experienced sexual violence to 
honor their resilience. We’ve also chosen to use the word prisoner when specific are referencing people who are currently 
incarcerated; our experience is that the term is less stigmatizing than 
inmate or offender. 
Where we use prison or correctional 
terms, we have defined them in text. We have also used several terms to describe prisoners leaving the correctional system, and heading home—returning citizen, 
reentering person, etc. All of these are interchangeable in this tool kit. A 
returning or reentering survivor 
is a prisoner coming home who has also experienced sexual violence, whether 
that violence took place before they we incarcerated or after.

9
Staff don’t have a lot 
of training about this, 
and they stereotype 
people a lot. There’s 
a pervasive sense of 
you’re gonna get what 
you’re gonna get. You 
put yourself in here.

Formerly incarcerated listening session participant


Black teen with winter coat and glasses embraces another person who is facing away from the camera

Rape Crisis Centers Should 
Play a Bigger Role in Reentry

Many people living in the United 
States have experienced 
incarceration at some point in their 
lives. A snapshot of the incarcerated 
population from 2018 finds close to 2.3 
million people are held by American 
correctional institutions—about a third 
in long-term incarceration (prisons), and 
the other two-thirds in shorter term 
(jails) or community-based correctional 
organizations.7 That number, while huge, 
actually undercounts the number of 
people who experience incarceration 
in a given year, because incarceration 
becomes a revolving door for so many 
people. Over 10 million people are sent 
to jail every year.8 Of the people serving 

time in prison, nearly half are serving 
time for a nonviolent offense.9 Local jails 
are different—the Prison Policy Initiative 
estimates that 76% of people held in local 
jails are awaiting trial.10 They have not 
been convicted of any crime.
This incarceration burden does not fall 
equally across all communities. Black 
communities are especially impacted. 
While making up 13% of the U.S. 
population, black prisoners represent 
40% of the incarcerated population.11 In 
a 2016 report, the Boston Foundation 
found that in some neighborhoods of 
color in Boston, the incarceration rate 
was so high that nearly one person was 

7 Prison Policy Initiative, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019, March 2019, https://www.prisonpolicy.
org/reports/pie2019.html.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ The Chicago Lawyers' Committee's Review of Alternatives for NonViolent Offenders, page 1, https://www.
prisonpolicy.org/scans/Non-Violent_Offenders_Memo.pdf. Additionally, the distinction between 
“violent” and “nonviolent” offenses is incredibly opaque, much like the presumed dichotomy between 
perpetrator and victim. Certain offenses can be labeled violent (like felony murder), where a prisoner 
committed no actual violence against any victim, but was roped into violence perpetrated by another. 
The distinction between violent and nonviolent offenders is often a proxy fight over what segment of the 
reentering population is morally worthy of receiving the support to successfully reintegrate into their 
communities. See also: Jamiles Lartey, “Can We Fix Mass Incarceration Without Including Violent 
Offenders?” The Marshall Project, December 12, 2019, https://
www.themarshallproject.org/2019/12/12/can-we-fix-mass-incarceration-without-including-violent-
offenders. “Booker also added a broader point, that ‘saying ‘violent offenders’ and making these 
distinctions means that you don't think someone is worthy of redemption.’”
10 Prison Policy Initiative, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019.11 Ibid.
12
missing from every other home on some 
streets.12

Reentry and the role of rape 
crisis centers

Reentry is the term used to describe 
the process of prisoners leaving 
correctional institutions and returning 
to their community. The vast majority of 
people who are incarcerated do come 
home: 95% of state prisoners will leave 
incarceration at some point, and some 
9 million prisoners leave local jails each 
year.13 Each one of these reentering 
people needs to find housing, some form 
of employment or income, and services to 
assist in readjusting to life outside of the 
correctional system. 

Too often, they also need services to heal 
from unaddressed trauma stemming from 
sexual violence, but they rarely access 
those services. Although these services 
do not immediately come to mind when 
most people think about reentry, the 
truth is that the field of sexual violence 
prevention and response has a major role 
to play in reentry. 

Many people are survivors when they 
enter the correctional systemA huge number of people enter the 
correctional system already having 
experienced sexual violence. Most 
women enter prison as survivors of 
sexual violence or coercion.14 Numbers 
for men are more difficult to find, but 
research indicates that men who enter 

12 The Boston Foundation, The Geography of Incarceration, October 2016, https://www.bostonindica-
tors.org/-/media/indicators/boston-indicators-reports/report-files/geography-of-incarceration-2016. 
pdf?la=en. “Spending for incarceration is out of balance. For example, more was spent incarcerating Cod-
man Square residents (a neighborhood in Boston) in 2013 than was spent on grants for gang prevention 
for the entire state of Massachusetts.”
13 “NRRC Facts and Trends,” National Reentry Resource Center, https://csgjusticecenter.org/nrrc/facts-
and-trends/.
14 Hilary Johnston, “War on Victims: The Sexual Abuse Histories of Incarcerated Women” (undergrad-
uate thesis, University of Colorado Boulder, 2015), table 3, https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/un-
dergraduate_honors_theses/736665263. This study estimated that 70% of female prisoners had expe-
rienced sexual violence prior to incarceration. Like any study of the prevalence of sexual violence, this 
number could be substantially higher, due to concerns about reporting to law enforcement officials or 
reticence to talk with researchers. Additionally, researchers at Georgetown Law and Ms. Magazine found 
in their report The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story (available at https://www.law.george-
town.edu/poverty-inequality-center/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2019/02/The-Sexual-Abuse-To-Pris-
on-Pipeline-The-Girls%E2%80%99-Story.pdf) that the entry point into the correctional system for many 
girls in particular is sexual violence. Girls trying to get away from sexual abuse are often arrested under 
paternalistic laws that prohibit running away from home or truancy from school, and force them into 
the foster care or family protection system. Once in these systems, the likelihood that they will spend 
at least some time in the correctional system increases substantially. These young survivors are then at 
higher risk for further violence due to both being prisoners and survivors.
13
the system also have significant histories 
of trauma.15 

FORGE, a national transgender anti-
violence organization, estimates 
that 50% of transgender people have 
experienced sexual violence at some 
point in their lives, which suggests that 
transgender people who are incarcerated 
have high rates of prior victimization.16 
Many people experience sexual 
violence while incarceratedFurther, while incarcerated, a huge 
number of people experience sexual 
violence. A Bureau of Justice Statistics 
report found that about 4% of 

people incarcerated in prisons and 
3.2% incarcerated in jails reported 
experiencing sexual violence over the 
course of 12 months.17 This might also 
not reflect the true scale of the problem; 
there are a host of reasons why prisoners 
don’t make reports to correctional 
officials or want to talk to researchers.18 
The number of prisoners assaulted could 
be as high as 200,000 people each year.19 
Depending on the survey and research 
used, prison sexual violence could 
account for between one third and one 
half of all sexual violence in the country.20 
The risk of assault for people who are 
incarcerated is between three and four 
times higher than the risk for a member 
of the general population. 


The numbers look even more dire for 
transgender prisoners—more than one 
in three trans prisoners said they’d 
experienced sexual violence in the past 
year.21 

Most people return home having 
never received any help for 
sexual traumaIncarcerated survivors often lack the 
support, counseling, and community 
needed to heal. Prisons have inadequate 
mental health services, they are not 
designed to support healing, and they 
don’t often have the resources to treat 
sexual violence and post-traumatic stress 
disorder comprehensively.22 Additionally, 
regaining agency and control can be 
central to healing from sexual violence, 
and incarceration, where prisoners have 
limited authority over any day-to-day 
decisions, is a poor environment for that 
process. A common thought expressed 
by the consultants, and other formerly 
incarcerated people we spoke to, was 
“prison is a bad place for therapy.” Most 
survivors have no realistic healing options 
while incarcerated.

Furthermore, in addition to lack of access 
to services, the dehumanizing and 
otherwise unsettling environments of 
many incarceration settings, conditions 
which have been repeatedly challenged 
in lawsuits, can in themselves cause and 
exacerbate trauma. (This is explored in 
more detail in Finding 1).

On the outside, people continue to face 
barriers to healing. A number of major 
reports have echoed the importance of 
having trauma-supportive services for 
people reentering their communities,23 
but many reentry agencies are small and 
do not have the capacity to focus on 
those needs. For those that do, they may 
not have staff with sexual trauma 
expertise. Rape crisis centers and other 
sexual violence prevention agencies are 
well poised to understand and meet the 
needs of survivors who are coming 
home from incarceration. Rape crisis 
centers have the knowledge and 
expertise to address sexual trauma, 
offer services at low or no cost, and are 
located in cities and communities where 
many people return.


If this gets out 
[being a survivor of 
sexual assault], I’ll 
be ridiculed. If the 
general staff finds out, 
I’m gonna get singled 
out for bad treatment.

Formerly incarcerated listening session participant


Latina woman leaning on a railing looking into the distance; she is touching her ear with her hand
Latina woman leaning on a railing casually, touching her face

them as they navigate the health-care, 
criminal legal, social service, and 
school systems. 

BARCC assists thousands of sexual 
violence survivors and their families, 
friends and communities each year, 
regardless of sex, gender identity, race, 
physical/developmental disabilities, 
income, ethnicity, class, religion, or sexual 
orientation.

We take the knowledge we learn from 
survivors and from current research out 
into the community. We work with a wide 
range of schools, campuses, community 
groups, institutions, and organizations. 
These include middle and high schools, 
colleges, police, health-care providers, 
businesses, and prisons and jails. 

Through our Incarcerated Survivor 
Support program (ISSP)34, we provide 
emotional support and resources to 
survivors of sexual violence who are 
incarcerated in Massachusetts to help 
them heal from assault and reduce the 
trauma of incarceration. 
We also train correctional institutions on 
how to effectively reduce and prevent 
sexual violence and how to work with 
traumatized survivors so that they 
can heal. 


maladaptive outside the correctional 
context.

●Reentry is major trigger for 
anxiety. This section details how 
incarceration is an institutionalizing 
experience; it conditions prisoners 
to adapt to life inside. Reentry is a 
major life change for a prisoner, and 
that uncertainty and change often 
increases anxiety. 
● Reentering survivors often don’t 
seek help for the trauma they’ve 
experienced. Many formerly 
incarcerated survivors may not 

identify themselves as survivors, or 
victims, or as people dealing with 
sexual trauma. Much of the outside 
world has never viewed them 
that way. Despite dealing with a 
substantial amount of trauma, many 
do not seek services because they 
have no connection to the rape crisis 
center world and no idea that it is 
available to them (or they are 
afraid of being stigmatized and 
turned away).

19
20
Finding 1 

Powerlessness and loss of control 
are defining characteristics of both 
incarceration and sexual violence

The definition of sexual violence 
that BARCC often uses is “any 
sexual activity done to someone without 
consent.” This can include physical acts, 
such as groping or rape, and it can include 
verbal or cyber acts, like harassment and 
stalking. Across all those experiences, 
the key unifying traits are that these 
activities that involve the body and/or 
sex, and that they are not consensual. For 
many survivors, their experience of these 
acts leaves them feeling powerless.

That same feeling of powerlessness is 
also one of the most common experiences 
in prison. One of the most basic 
components of being in prison or jail is 
no longer having freedom of movement. 
Correctional staff control where 
prisoners can go within a facility; where 
they can sit and stand; who they can 
touch (virtually no one); who can touch 
them (virtually all correctional staff, who 
conduct all manner of physical searches, 
especially for security concerns); when to 

eat, sleep, shower, and use the bathroom; 
and when they can see family members 
and friends. As a result, virtually all 
people who are incarcerated have 
experienced unwanted contact during 
their time inside, as well as other people 
controlling their body. For many, this 
means that the correctional system is 
highly triggering and often compounds 
previous trauma. 

Virtually all prisoners 
have experienced 
unwanted contact 
during their time inside 
as well as other people 
controlling their body.


For survivors who are 
incarcerated and need to get 
an evidence collection kit done, 
every step in the exam process 
is characterized by a lack of 
autonomy, power, and control. 

First, PREA mandates that all 
correctional staff be mandated 
reporters of sexual abuse.24 A 
prisoner who wants to have a kit 
done is also disclosing an assault, 
de facto; they have no choice 
in whether the staff will make a 
PREA report. 

Second, if a prisoner needs to 
leave the facility25 for an exam, 
they need to be searched. A 
prisoner may need to ride in a 
special prison van for several 
hours, usually in restraints, to 

24 This is the terminology PREA uses for physical sexual assault.
25 A number of states (including Massachusetts, where BARCC has the most experi-
ence) transport prisoners to a local hospital for evidence collection kits. Several states 
also bring SANEs into a facility to perform the examination on prison or jail grounds.
get to the hospital where an 
examination will happen. 

When they arrive, many 
prisoners will be shackled to 
their examination bed, with an 
officer feet away from them 
to ensure safety. The officer 
may write down everything the 
prisoner says to the nurse or 
advocate, for the purpose of 
following up on the PREA report. 
Most survivors do not speak 
freely as a result of this.

21
Finally, this experience of powerlessness 

and loss of control is deeply 
dehumanizing for many people who are 
incarcerated. Facilities often refer to 
prisoners by their last name or by their 
inmate commit number (an identifying 
serial number). Staff are not allowed 

to form friendly relationships with the 
prisoners under their custody—it can be a 
safety risk and often violates professional 
codes of conduct for correctional staff. 
That professionalism can be experienced 
by prisoners, however, as aloof 
and dehumanizing. 

Example: Evidence Collection Kits


22
Implications of this finding 
for rape crisis centers

26 For example, if a prisoner is triggered during a search and refuses to let an officer finish searching them, they may be given a disciplinary ticket (a “d-report”) and sent to administrative segregation 
(solitary confinement). Most prisoners loathe segregation, and it’s a serious punishment. 
For some of these survivors, they may 
not recognize that what happened to 
them was sexual violence because they 
may never have had non-abusive 
relationships. Many formerly 
incarcerated survivors are trying to work 
through complicated, overlapping 
traumas and have never gotten support 
for them—rape crisis centers need to 
take a patient and long-term approach to 
working with survivors who are trying to 
untangle abuse that could quite long-
standing.

Being re-traumatized is a common 
and painful experience while 
incarcerated 
Especially for survivors who experienced 
sexual violence before they entered 
the correctional system, the feeling of 
being powerless, of not having control 
over their environment or body, is an 
omnipresent experience that is 
extremely triggering. The consultants 
told us about feeling constantly on edge, 
hypervigilant, and stressed. Everyday 
experiences in prison and jail can trigger 
a survivor, and more difficult situations 
like physical searches can be the locus for 
significant anxiety. If a survivor’s 
response to being triggered violates an 
order or safety guidelines in the facility, 
they risk being punished or subjected to 
further violence for breaking the rules.26 

Many reentering survivors have 
complex trauma histories that are not always recognized 
Previous trauma they experienced before their time in the correctional system is 
compounded by experiences they had 
inside and by the inability to realistically 
address either while incarcerated. 
Survivors may have been through 
multiple assaults at various times in 
their lives. Some will have experienced 
incarceration because their attempts as 
children or teenagers to avoid violence 
were criminalized. 

Rape crisis centers need 
to take a long-term 
approach when working 
with survivors who were 
formerly incarcerated. 
Being incarcerated is 
an omnipresent 
experience that is 
extremely triggering. 


23
These survivors learn to hide the fact 
that they have been triggered, or their 
behavior is mistaken as aggression or 
rule breaking.

No privacyThere is no secrecy or privacy in prison. 
Confidentiality for anything is extremely 
limited. Even things that are supposed to 
be private—like calls to an attorney—
usually happen in the middle of a housing 
unit, where other prisoners or staff could 
potentially overhear. This has a number 
of effects—prisoners are less likely to 
trust mechanisms designed to keep them 
safe, like PREA, because they don’t 
believe their disclosures will be kept 
secret. 

Second, and more important for long-
term healing, is that many prisoners have 
never had the chance to talk to anyone 
about the sexual violence they have 
experienced. They rarely have the ability 
to connect with anyone in a confidential 
way, and they learn not to talk about 
things that could make them vulnerable. 
It can be difficult to encourage them to 
talk about their experiences without 
building up a lot of trust first.


24
Finding 2 

Survivors use whatever coping 
techniques they can to survive prison

Prisons and jails are highly 
controlled, dehumanizing, and 
sometimes dangerous places. The 
consultants, particularly our male 
consultants, spoke repeatedly about 
how essential it was not to be seen as 
vulnerable on the inside. Being seen as 
vulnerable was as good as guaranteeing 
that a prisoner would be harmed. In 
this way, the prison system conditions 
prisoners to discard or disguise any 
shred of potential vulnerability they 
might have. 

In a context of constant potential danger, 
prisoners learn what tools are effective 
for day-to-day survival—and if they 
don’t, they are harmed (and sometimes 
killed). These coping techniques include 
protective pairings (see below), trying 
excise any expression of emotion, joining 
gangs, and more. It means that most 
prisoners develop incredibly sharp 
perceptions about the kinds of actions 
that precipitate violence and learn how 
to respond to them. 

Many of these strategies are not well 
adapted for life on the outside, though. 
Many prisoners struggle to shake off the 
conditioning they built up on the inside 
when they come back home. Behaviors 
that forewarned of danger inside prison 
and that needed to be met with violence 
or other extreme responses no longer 
have those same connotations on the 
outside. Techniques that used to keep 
prisoners safe on the inside can get 
returning citizens into trouble at home.

The prison system 
conditions prisoners 
to discard or disguise 
any shred of potential 
vulnerability they might 
have. To survive, it is 
essential to not be seen 
as vulnerable. 


25
For many incarcerated people, the 
only way to guarantee safety 
(physical or emotional) is to ensure 
that they are respected among 
their peers. Respect is generally 
earned by displaying strength and 
showing no emotion. 

We consistently heard from our 
consultants that without either 
earning respect or finding the 
protection of someone who 
already has it, a new prisoner 
would be in a very vulnerable 
position. 

Once respect is earned, it also has 
to be maintained, and if a prisoner 
doesn’t respond to any signs of 
disrespect, he can be putting a 
target on his back.
Disrespect can take many forms: 
stepping in front of others at meal 
times, bumping someone’s 

shoulder in the hallway, or making 
eye contact for too long. Many 
of these seem trivial outside 
prison, but inside the correctional 
culture these actions are viewed 
challenges to someone’s respect. 

Prisoners learn how to enforce 
respect often by adopting 
hypermasculine traits like increased 
aggression, homophobia, and 
meeting disrespect with violence 
or social force. Some adopt 
hypermasculine postures to stave 
off claims they are gay, because 
being seen as lesbian, gay, bisexual, 
queer, and/or transgender 
(LGBQ/T) can subject a prisoner to 

more violence. 
A prisoner who doesn’t or can’t do 
that is fair game for harassment 
or abuse. Essentially, if a prisoner 
can’t defend himself in prison, he 
was responsible for what happened 
to him. 

Example: Masculinity and the role of "respect"27 

27 We heard the most about this concept of respect from our male consultants, and the 
specifics of how respect is discussed here is based mostly on their statements. Respect is 
still crucial in women’s facilities, but violence in women’s prisons has a different character 
(including less violent sexual abuse and more sexual coercion).
26
Implications of this finding 
for rape crisis centers

Aggression is normalized 
Violence and aggression are regular 
features of prison and jail, particularly for 
men's facilities. These are hostile places, 
and people learn quickly to form alliances 
or learn to keep their heads down in 
order to do their time. Violence is often 
used inside to maintain social hierarchy 
and pecking orders—prisoners who don’t 
know about those rules, or don’t want to 
follow them, will be targeted. 

Sometimes staff will be able to prevent 
fights or targeted attacks, but they are 
sometimes the initiators of violence. 
What this can mean long-term for many 
survivors, though, is that they stop 
identifying the violence they experience 
as unusual or abnormal—it’s become a 
part of day-to-day life for them. They may 
have a hard time recognizing that they’ve 
been affected by violence.

Survivors build coping techniques 
that work in prisonIn order to survive prison or jail, 
prisoners find coping strategies that are 
incarceration-specific. Very few prisoners will be able to use safety techniques that 
a rape crisis center might encourage 
on the outside.28 Prisoners use many 
strategies; some will enter “protective 

28 For non-incarcerated survivors, this might include techniques like going for a walk in a place the 
survivor feels safe, making a favorite dinner or meal, or talking with trusted friends and family.
pairings,” where they agree to have sex 
with another prisoner for protection 
from violence, extortion, or other forms 
of coercion; some will agree to have sex 
with staff for increased privileges or 
other resources. 

Some prisoners decide that becoming 
aggressive and scaring other prisoners 
or staff is what will help keep them 
safe. Some of these techniques are 
maladaptive for life outside facilities but 
can be very hard to break because of how 
deeply ingrained they become.

Unfamiliar people or situations are 
warning signsPrivacy is incredibly scarce in prison. 
Most incarcerated people learn quickly 
that if they want to keep information 
private, they likely can’t share it with 
other prisoners and also not with staff, 
because that information can be used 
against them. This creates a strong 

Formerly incarcerated 
survivors may have a 
hard time recognizing 
that they've been 
affected by violence. 


27
culture of distrust—when prisoners 
can’t share information they might need 
to share in order to receive services 
or support, it damages the possibility 
of creating supportive relationships. 
Over time, people learn the patterns 
and habits of their facility, and that can 
provide space for limited trust to develop 
between individual prisoners, or between 
prisoners and specific staff members, 
but anything that changes the status quo 
once a prisoner has become accustomed 
to it can be incredibly threatening. That 
unknown can be a new prisoner or staff 
member who no one in the facility knows; 
it can be a change in the routine of the 

facility that no one expected; or it can 
be other changes that upend the social 
hierarchy of the facility. Because of how 
dangerous unpredictability can be in a 
prison or jail, most prisoners learn not to 
trust people or groups they don’t know 
personally or know through a trusted 
word-of-mouth connection. Prisoners 
also have many reasons not to trust 
entities they don’t know because of the 
dehumanization they’ve experienced at 
the hands of the legal system broadly.


28
Finding 3 

Reentry causes a huge amount 
of anxiety

Incarceration conditions prisoners to 
prison life. People learn the rhythms of their facilities, the survival skills 
necessary to function, how to talk to 
other prisoners, and how to stay on the 
staff’s good side. Prisoners also get used 
to being told where to go at what time 
of the day, when to eat, go to class, go to 
work, and go to bed. Although prison is 
violent and often terrifying, over time, it 
also becomes familiar. For prisoners who 
have served long sentences of 10 or 20 
years, prison may be the home that they 
have lived in for the longest period of 
time. 

When people prepare to reenter their 
community, though, all of the tasks of 
day-to-day living they learned inside 
need to be replaced with an entirely 
new, and often very alien, set of life skills. 
This is daunting for many prisoners. This 
transition is characterized by a huge 
amount of anxiety: about the lack of 
stability that being on the outside poses; 
the lack of job skills; fear about housing; 
fear about facing shame and stigma from 

the outside world; fear about technology 
or understanding modern life effectively; 
fear of not having a community or friends 
easily accessible. Reentry is such an 
anxiety-provoking experience that one 
of the major institutional risk factors for 
suicide in a facility, especially for longer 
serving prisoners, is getting close to a 
release date. 

Those returning home 
from incarceration 
find reentry into their 
community daunting. 
This transition is 
characterized by a huge 
amount of anxiety. 


One of the major areas of fear 
and anxiety we heard about was 
technology. 

29
For prisoners who have been 
incarcerated for even a few years, 
the pace of technological change 
is so fast that they may come 
home to find out that they don’t 
know how to use a computer or a 
phone anymore. 

They may not know how to use 
resources like a GPS device, how 

to schedule appointments on a 
digital calendar, or how to send 
e-mails or attachments.

Part of the anxiety of coming 
home for some prisoners is 
realizing that their communities, 
friends, and families all have 
new ways of communicating and 
interacting with each other, and 
the returning people don’t know 
how to engage with any of them 
in the same ways.

Example: Technology

Implications of this finding 
for rape crisis centers

Institutionalization 
Any form of incarceration will include 
a huge element of structure, and that 
structure is gone the moment a prisoner 
leaves. As described in the last section, 
all of this structure (whether formal 
facility protocols or the social hierarchy 
of the prisoners) is enforced with strict 
rules and sometimes violence. Prisoners 
become institutionalized over time—they 
adapt mentally and emotionally 
to life inside. As a result, the process of 
reentering is marked by constant and 

often disorienting change. Day-to-day 
life skills that rape crisis centers assume 
, 

many clients possess may be new and 
real challenges for reentering people, 
including some basic ones, like crossing the street. For prisoners who have 
learned quite rightly to fear spaces with lots of people in them where they don’t know everyone in the room, and where having no escape options can mean 
the difference between being safe or 
going to the hospital with knife wound asking a survivor to take the subway or 
a bus to get to an office or appointment 
can trigger a panic attack. This can be 
intensely isolating and alienating.


30
Dealing with trauma gets put on the 
back burnerMany returning citizens don’t have 
support networks that can ensure they 
have adequate housing, employment, 
or safety when they return home. For 
survivors in this situation, much of their 
focus when going through the reentry 
process is finding a place to live or a 
program to enter, and then getting 
enough money to afford to stay there. 

Addressing unresolved sexual trauma is 
not usually high on the list of priorities 
for returning citizens, because of how 
immediate the needs are for shelter 
and employment. As a result, many 
returning survivors are dealing with 
unresolved trauma throughout the 
already emotionally disorienting reentry 
process. Unpacking sexual trauma with 
this population can be a significant task29

 

because so much of the rest of their life 
during reentry is unstable. 

Societal stigma is a huge barrier, as is 
the fear of itReentering people face a huge amount 
of stigma from employers, housing 
providers, community members, and 
oftentimes service providers for being 
“ex-cons” or “offenders.” This increases 

29 Erin Cournoyer Allain, policy specialist at the Crime and Justice Institute, has been working on her 
dissertation “Finding the Path to Reentry Together: Staff and Resident Perspectives at a Women’s Half-
way House” with reentering women living in Community Resources for Justice’s McGrath House facility 
in Boston for several years. Although her dissertation is not published yet, one of the important trends 
she found was that the women who came to McGrath and then transferred home to the community had 
a set of common priorities: stable housing, a job, and family unification (if they were parents) were consistently at the top of the list. Dealing with their own trauma (sexual or otherwise) was oftentimes last on 
that list, if it was on the list at all.
Unpacking sexual 
trauma with formerly 
incarcerated people can 
be a significant task due 
to the instability caused 
by the reentry process. 

anxiety and makes it hard to seek 
services or trust agencies to which the 
returning citizen doesn’t already have a 
connection, or a strong word-of-mouth 
referral. 
Ideally, the consultants told us, they 
would engage the services of agencies 
with which they already had a 
connection before they left their 
facilities—agencies that sent volunteers 
into the prisons or jails to start building 
relationships ahead of time, or the 
association organizations, like Alcoholics 
Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, 
that had a lot of in-facility support and 
strong networks of word-of-mouth 
support. 


31
Going to a service provider without 
knowing them directly or having the 
recommendation of another reentering 
person who vouched for them, means 
risking rejection, discrimination, 
and shame. 
Rape crisis centers will need to connect 
with other community organizations that 
already have the trust of this population in 
order to get clients to trust them.

Rape crises centers 
need to connect 
with community 
organizations that 
already have the trust 
of formerly incarcerated 
people. Strong word-
of-mouth support 
decreases anxiety and 
builds trust. 


32
Finding 4 

The reentering population doesn’t seek 
services from rape crisis centers

Although the reentering population 
experiences high rates of sexual 
violence, reentering survivors may not 
seek out rape crisis center support. 
Specific statistics are difficult to find here, 
but the information we gathered from the 
consultants and the anecdotal evidence 
from a number of other providers 
indicated that many returning citizens 
don’t seek help for sexual trauma. 
The most foundational cause for this 
reality we discussed in the introduction: 
most of this population has never 
been viewed as victims or survivors 
by any system with which they were 
involved—before, during, or after their 
incarceration.30 Because the rape crisis 
field broadly has not engaged in the 
crucial outreach necessary to ensure that 
this population was aware that services 

30 Sometimes with the exception of the child welfare system—but where these systems sometimes do 
view the justice-involved youth population as victims may ultimately be harmful and involve adverse 
childhood experiences, the impact of which often remains unaddressed. See also: Malika Saada Saar, 
Rebecca Epstein, Lindsay Rosenthal, and Yasmin Vafa, The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ 
Story, Ms. Magazine and Georgetown Law School, 28, https://www.law.georgetown.edu/poverty-in-
equality-center/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2019/02/The-Sexual-Abuse-To-Prison-Pipeline-The-
Girls%E2%80%99-Story.pdf.
are available in the first place, returning 
citizens often don’t have relationships 
with rape crisis centers or their staff. 
Many returning survivors don’t look 
for rape crisis centers because of how 
difficult it is to trust unknown entities 
and because of the fear of facing further 

The rape crisis field 
has not engaged in 
the crucial outreach 
necessary to ensure that 
formerly incarcerated 
people are aware of the 
services available. 


rejection or stigma. And that’s if they 
even recognize their experience in the 
framework of sexual violence (see finding 
2). For many formerly incarcerated men 
in particular, they may see many forms of 
sexual victimization as choices they had 
to make to survive. They may not respond 
to traditional victim services or clinical 
language around victimology and are less 
likely to relate to terms like “survivor” or 
“victim.” 
For example, some prisoners may claim 
that they wanted a romantic relationship 

with a staff member or that they agreed 
to have sex with another prisoner 
in order to pay off a debt. While an 
advocate might recognize the coercive 
nature of these acts, many formerly 
incarcerated survivors will see them not 
as consensual, specifically, but as the 
strategies they actively chose to survive 
and not as sexual violence. They may 
also connect the trauma responses they 
experience in the wake of sexual violence 
to just being incarcerated, instead of to 
being a survivor.

33
One of the interesting notes from 
the consultants was about what 
types of service providers they 
trusted to help them during their 
reentry process and would go to 
for help. 
An answer we received repeatedly 
were the “association programs,” 
the two biggest examples of 
which are Alcoholics Anonymous 
and Narcotics Anonymous. 
The consultants said that these 
types of groups were really 
valuable for people who could 

use them because they started 
building relationships with 
prisoners before they started to 
come home. 
That relationship-building 
component was so important 
that the consultants mentioned 
using the connections they had 
from the association programs 
to ask for help dealing with 
challenges that had nothing to do 
with what AA or NA traditionally 
does, like getting rides to work or 
a place to crash. 

Example: Association programs


34
Implications of this finding 
for rape crisis centers

There is no culture of getting service

s 
ly 

from rape crisis centers 
Word-of-mouth referrals from other 
formerly incarcerated clients are probably the most important way that agencies 
extend their reach with the reentering 
population. Because much of the rape 
crisis field hasn’t started working with 
incarcerated or formerly incarcerated 
survivors, this word of mouth referral 
system doesn’t exist. 

Most rape crisis centers aren’t trusted 
entities in communities hit hard by 
incarceration, simply because those 
community relationships have not been 
established. Without specific outreach to 
find this population of survivors, rape 
crisis centers are much less likely to find 
them seeking services organically.

Sexual violence goes unaddressed and 
affects reentryIf they are not able to find support 
for their experiences of trauma or 
are never told that their experiences are 
abnormal in the first place, many 
reentering survivors never actually 
receive any focused sexual violence 
support. The correctional system is not set 
up to provide that form of therapeutic 
response to trauma, even in facilities with 

adequate mental and behavioral health 
staffing. 
When these survivors return home 
amidst the disorientation of reentry, 
they may experience panic attacks, 
dissociation, flashbacks, and a wide 
host of other trauma responses that can 
make successful reentry particularly 
difficult and can put them at risk for re-
incarceration (for coping techniques like 
substance use, for example). For a subset 
of survivors with complex and repeated 
trauma, without support from a rape 
crisis center, they are likely to continue 
cycling into the correctional system.

For a subset of survivors 
with complex and 
repeated trauma, 
without support from 
a rape crisis center, 
they are likely to 
continue cycling into the 
correctional system. 


35
The onus is on rape crisis centers to 
find new language to work with this 
populationTraditional victim services frameworks, 
like the victim/perpetrator binary 
discussed in the introduction, may not 
reach returning survivors—especially 
men. 
The language of survivor or victim can 
feel disempowering or foreign to some 

reentering citizens. Many of them still 
need the kind of support that rape crisis 
centers can offer but may never feel 
comfortable going to an agency that 
only communicates its services using a 
traditional rape crisis center framework. 
Finding new ways to talk about trauma, 
victimization, and sexual violence will 
ease some of those burdens and 
concerns. 


You speak the truth 
there [association 
groups], and it’s a safe 
place for feelings—
even for those who 
didn’t grow up having 
those conversations. 
Seeing people model 
that openness is how 
you learn it.

Formerly incarcerated listening session participant


an older Black man and a younger white man with nametags sitting and looking at something in front of them

Road Map to Serving 
Returning Survivors

This section of the tool kit focuses 
on how rape crisis centers can 
prepare themselves to effectively work 
with formerly incarcerated survivors 
in their service area. It provides a road 
map of more specific, concrete steps 
for an agency to take to prepare for 
working with this population. The 
recommendations come directly from 
the implications in the previous section, 
from BARCC’s own experience building 

the ISSP, and the experience of the Office 
of Returning Citizens, our partner agency 
for the project.
This last piece of the report is broken into 
three phases that rape crisis centers will 
want to execute in order, with granular 
steps and recommendations for each. For 
each step, we have also provided several 
resources that can provide more context 
or direction. 

38
Summary of recommendations

Phase 1: Preparation•Build internal capacity to work with incarcerated survivors.
•Learn about the challenges of reentry in your community.
•Conduct outreach to let your community know you can provide services.
Phase 2: Serving Clients Successfully•Build rapport with formerly incarcerated people.
•Enhance client services.
Phase 3: Maintaining a Strong Reputation•Build sustainable relationships with a network of providers.


39
Phase 1: Preparation 

All of the steps in this phase focus on 
building the infrastructure inside a 
rape crisis center to work with formerly 
incarcerated clients. From building 
protocols necessary to support these 
survivors to finding out what outreach 

the rape crisis center needs to do to find 
this population, these are all necessary 
steps to undertake before welcoming 
reentering survivors through the door. 

1)Build internal capacity to work with formerly incarcerated survivors

An agency should educate its staff 
on some of the realities of being 
institutionalized in an inherently violent 
system. This serves to foster empathy, 
which is important for diffusing fear and 
judgment. Ideally, rape crisis centers 
should confront their own biases or 
gaps in knowledge around incarceration 
before they ever work with a returning 
survivor. Finding 3 directly discussed 
the fear of rejection and stigma that 
formerly incarcerated survivors fear 
when they connect with new, unproven 
service providers. These techniques 
should help ensure that your staff can 
react to formerly incarcerated people 
with empathy and compassion, and not 
fear or judgment. 

Recommendations for 
building internal capacity 

Train staff on implicit bias, racism, 
and stereotypes about prisonersHave a dialogue session with staff 
internally to discuss concerns and fears 
about working with former prisoners. 
A good, vetted training on unconscious 
bias and/or racism and the criminal legal 

Implicit bias, racism, 
and stereotype training 
about prisoners 
is essential.


4031 When working with prisoners and the criminal legal system at large, it’s vital to acknowledge and 
address systemic racism and its impact on individuals and communities. Unconscious bias training is a 
good start, but a holistic anti-racism training is likely to be more helpful in understanding the oppression 
that many people who are incarcerated have experienced. Also, a better understanding of racism and 
racial tensions in the rape crisis center movement will provide more context for the lack of relationship 
between many (not all) rape crisis centers and communities that have experienced incarceration broad-
ly. See: Gillian Greensite, “History of the Rape Crisis Movement,” CALCASA Blog, November 1, 2009, 
https://www.calcasa.org/2009/11/history-of-the-rape-crisis-movement/.
32 Great resources include Just Detention International, Black & Pink, and the National Council for 
Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.
can also be very valuable for helping rape 
crisis centers understand the experience 
of prison and jail in your area and the 
local correctional lingo.
Create formal, written protocols 
for working with perpetrators of 
violence or sexual violence 
Although the majority of reentering 
survivors aren’t perpetrators of sexual 
violence, some of them may be, and a 
wider swathe may have committed some 
form of interpersonal violence.

It is valuable for your staff to be on the 
same page about what your agency’s 
limitations are in working with survivors 
who may also have perpetrated some 
level of interpersonal violence (including 
sexual violence) in their past, including 
during their incarceration. This protocol 
doesn’t have to land on any particular 
policy decision; it’s more important that 
there is a clear, written, formal policy 
that you can eventually share with other 
community agencies so that you only get 
referrals for appropriate clients than that 
your agency has decided not to have 
any limitations. 

Acknowledge your 
agency's limitations 
around working with 
survivors who may also have perpetrated some level of interpersonal 
violence in their past. 

 


system can help bring to light any major 
concerns the staff have about working 
with this population.31Staff need to be able to hear that 
someone was incarcerated without 
flinching or making obvious body 
language indicators that they are scared 
or nervous. Role-playing trainings are 
valuable. Preferably, any training would 
involve an agency that already works 
with, or is run by, formerly incarcerated 
people,32 to go over cultural specifics 
about incarceration. A local coalition or 
organization that works with prisoners 


41
Advertising that your agency can support 
survivors that, in reality, it may not be 
able to support is a very good way to 
increase the distrust reentering survivors 
feel and dash your agency’s credibility 
with the community.
Build an agency competence around 
incarceration 
It may not be necessary or time- or cost-
effective to train every staff member 
to be an expert on the correctional 
system. But it is valuable for some staff to 
understand the impact the correctional 
system can have on survivors’ psyches 
and healing journeys. Learn about the 
impacts of incarceration, especially 
from a trauma-informed perspective. 

The important piece here for rape 
crisis centers to keep in mind is that the 
impacts of incarceration are numerous 
and often times invisible. 
If it’s possible to designate a staff 
member or better, a team member to 
be the holder of this knowledge, they 
can then share what they learn over the 
course of trainings and other professional 
development opportunities with the rest 
of the staff. If it is possible, have them 
tour a local prison or jail to get a sense of 
what the environment is like inside.

Resources

•New York State PREA video:
docc.ny.gov/PREA/PREAinfo.html•Just Detention webinars on prison culture:
justdetention.org/webinar/#archived•Life Inside, a collaboration between Vice News and theMarshall Project:
themarshallproject.org/tag/life-inside-with-vice


42
Reentry causes substantial emotional 
and mental stress to people coming 
home. But it also involves a lot of 
logistics, including developing a 
housing plan, getting appropriate 
government identification, signing up 
for health insurance if it is available, and 
following any conditions of post-release 
supervision. 

For rape crisis centers that want to serve 
this population, they must learn what the 
reentry landscape looks like inside their 
service area. This includes understanding 
which correctional institutions release 
people to the area, the number released, 
and whether returning citizens typically 
make contact with specific organizations 
during reentry.

As we saw in finding 4, most reentering 
survivors don’t seek out rape crisis 
centers. In order to serve these survivors, 
agencies need to know the most 
promising access points for reaching 
them as well as how to market their 
services and what kinds of obstacles are 
preventing survivors from reaching out 
for assistance.

33 It is also recommended that rape crisis centers look into any major federal facilities that release a substantial number of people into the center’s service area. Prisoners held by the Federal Bureau of 
Prison (FBOP) may be incarcerated hundreds of miles away from their home communities and may have 
had serious obstacles to maintaining family or community support during their incarceration. A federal 
facility well outside of a center’s normal service area may still play a significant role in reentry within 
that service area. The First Step Act, passed in 2018, was a move in the right direction and requires 
FBOP to try to house prisoners as close as possible to their home communities, but it recognized that 
this could mean that prisoners are still housed up to 500 miles away from home. See: “An Overview of 
the First Step Act,” Federal Bureau of Prisons, https://www.bop.gov/inmates/fsa/overview.jsp.
Recommendations for 
learning about reentry 

Map the reentry landscape of your 
communityBuild a reentry map for your service area. 
Fill in the major correctional and reentry 
organizations that you can identify. Some 
suggestions for types of agencies you’ll 
want to put on the map:

•All correctional agencies in the area—prisons, jails, youth facilities33•Any probation or parole offices, ifyou have any in your area

Rape crisis centers 
that want to serve the 
formerly incarcerated 
population must learn 
the most promising 
access points in order to 
reach them. 

2)Learn about the challenges of reentry in your community


•Any municipal or governmental offices that serve formerly incarcerated people•Any halfway houses, substance use programs that work with reentering people, or step-down facilities in your area•Major reentry agencies—these maybe hard to find initially (ask the other agencies what referrals they make as they connect people to resources)
•Major faith-based agencies that support formerly incarcerated people

This map can give agencies a great 
foundation for understanding the 
reentry process survivors experience 
in their service area. A good starting 
point is connecting with the correctional 
institutions and finding out from their 
reentry staff where they most commonly 
send returning people. Parole and 
probation are also good starting points. 

Ideally, this process will connect 
rape crisis centers with community 
organizations staffed by formerly 
incarcerated people, who can share a 
much more nuanced understanding of 
the reentry experience. Once you have 
identified some of these organizations, 
hold a listening session with them about 
the places that were the most challenging 
as they went through the reentry process.

43
Rape crisis centers 
should identify the 
major challenges 
reentering survivors fa

ce 

to successful reentry. 
Then come up with 
concrete ideas on how 
to help your clients. 


Create a barriers listRape crisis centers should identify the 
major challenges reentering survivors face 
to successful reentry. Conversations with 
many of the same entities listed above can 
be helpful here, as can general research or 
connection with a local or state public health department. The goal is to find out what 
logistical issues prove to be the most difficul to surmount: In some areas, these barriers 
might be that transportation across the 
region is difficult and public transportation 
is poor. In others, it might be that housing is 
extremely limited or unaffordable. 

 
t 

Understanding what logistical challenges 
are preventing survivors from getting 
what they need to succeed will give rape 
crisis center concrete ideas for how to help 
their clients. As we know from finding 1, 
most reentering survivors are dealing with 
complex and often unaddressed trauma. 
Helping them with some concrete resources 
for finding stability as they reenter can make 
it more likely that they will be able to make 
use of your agency’s services effectively. 
Transportation, communication (not having 
a phone or other method of connecting with 
providers), housing, and safety are good 
big-picture categories to start investigating.

Collateral consequences

According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Collateral 
consequences are sanctions, restrictions, or disqualifications that 
stem from a person’s criminal history.”34 Collateral consequences 
affect almost every aspect of a formerly incarcerated person’s 
reintegration into their community, from limiting what kinds of 
housing they can apply for and secure, what kinds of jobs they can 
hold, how close they can live to public institutions like schools, 
what kinds of loans or grants they can receive, and whether they 
can vote. Although rape crisis centers may not have the reach to 
address many of the collateral consequences that an individual 
survivor might face during reentry, it is valuable to be mindful that 
these barriers often interact with, and exacerbate, other barriers 
that make it difficult for this population to seek services.

34 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Collateral Consequences: The Crossroads 
of Punishment, Redemption, and the Effects on Communities (Washington, 
DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, June 2019), 9, https://www.usccr.gov/
pubs/2019/06-13-Collateral-Consequences.pdf. 
44
45
Resources

•Coming Home Directory, Community Resources for Justice(this is an example of a type of directory or listing system for reentry services): cominghomedirectory.org/
•Vera Institute of Justice: Piloting a Tool for Reentry:
storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/
Publications/piloting-a-tool-for-reentry-a-promising-
approach-to-engaging-family-members/legacy_downloads/
Piloting-aTool-for-Reentry-Updated/pdf•National Reentry Resource Center: csgjusticecenter.org/nrrc•The Collateral Consequences Resource Center collects and organizes information about the types of collateral consequences former prisoners face throughout the country, including state-
specific laws and policies: ccresourcecenter.org

Understand what clients can and can’t do on community supervision/
parole/probationThis requires forming some kind of relationship with probation or parole, or at 
least having an awareness of the kinds of limitations those departments impose 
on reentering citizens. This will help ensure that when rape crisis centers are 
supporting clients, they aren’t making recommendations or scheduling sessions 
at times or in locations that will get those clients in trouble with their officers. 
Formerly incarcerated people have many reasons not to trust service providers 
if they have not previously worked with them—fears about facing negative 
reactions from staff, agencies not understanding their experience or needs, 
serious anxiety facing an unknown quantity, and more.


46
We learned in finding 2 that unknown 
people or organizations can feel 
dangerous for reentering survivors. A 
rape crisis center that wishes to reach 
this population needs to do so by building 
relationships with other agencies that 
already have the trust of this population, 
and getting referrals from those trusted 
sources. If possible, agencies that provide 
some sort of assistance “behind the 
walls” (i.e., when people are still 
incarcerated) have an even better 
opportunity to build good relationships. 
We heard from the consultants that this 
is how new agencies build up a reputation 
for themselves as being trustworthy—
they are vouched for by other agencies 
with a longer-standing tradition of 
working with the formerly incarcerated 
population.

Recommendations for 
conducting outreach to 
the community 

Map out what relationships you need 
to build to gain credibility with the 
populationAfter learning the reentry landscape, 
rape crisis centers should have a decent 
idea of what other agencies have 
credibility and trust from the formerly 
incarcerated population and regularly 
work with them. The next step is to find 
ways to build relationships with those 
organizations. Staff need to do outreach 
or provide materials like brochures 
and posters to places where formerly 
incarcerated survivors regularly go 
or congregate. 

Finding 3 indicated that association 
organizations (Alcoholics Anonymous, 
Narcotics Anonymous, etc.) were 
consistently indicated as strong 
providers. If connecting with one of 
those organizations locally is a possibility, 
see if you can find them and leave some 
brochures. 
Having a respected prisoner on the 
inside who has credibility and is willing 

Rape crisis centers need 
to build credibility and 
trust from the formerly 
incarcerated population 
and regularly work 
with them. 

3)Conduct outreach to let your community know you can provide services


47
to talk about your agency can drastically 
increase who is willing to come to you 
for services. Reputation is valuable, and 
prisoners who wouldn’t otherwise trust 
a service provider because they don’t 
have a relationship with them might 
be convinced to start one by another 
prisoner who has credibility inside 
the system. 
Incarcerated folks often rely heavily 
on firsthand recommendations from 
their peers precisely because so many 
resources are out of date or difficult to 
access. This requires access to prisons 
and jails, of course.

Create a custom intake pathway for 
formerly incarcerated survivorsMany reentering survivors need to rely 
on allies and friendly organizations to 
help them plan their reentry process. 
Small logistical concerns can present 
big challenge—not having a phone, for 
example, can make it hard to connect 
with an agency for a few weeks, and it 
may take that long to learn how to use a 
new phone even if they do have one. 
Rape crisis centers will want to work 
with other allied agencies that already 
have strong relationships with this 
population to create an intake pathway 
for potential clients that they can actual use. This should involve some paper 
forms for survivors who don’t have the 

y 

ability to access the internet or phones. A 
transportation plan to help get survivors 
to your agency or a location where they 
can meet with your staff is also a 
good idea. 
Once you have an intake process that 
reentering survivors can actually 
execute, write it down and share it 
with community partners. Also make 
it clear if there are rules or regulations 
that prohibit you from working with 
some subset of the population, e.g., 
perpetrators of sexual or interpersonal 
violence.
If it’s possible for that pathway to begin 
while someone is still incarcerated, that 
is ideal. Some facilities have reentry staff 
who host reentry fairs or reentry events 
on a monthly, quarterly, or other regular 

Rape crisis centers 
must work with 
allied agencies that 
already have strong 
relationships with this 
population to create 
an intake pathway for 
potential clients.


48
basis. These are usually some form of 
tabling event, and although it is unlikely 
that a single tabling will create the type 
of relationship with the reentering 
citizens that a rape crisis center might 
want, showing up to three or four in a row 
could start to have that impact. It creates 
familiarity, which is important for 
building trust.
Communicate the agency’s services to 
community partners, and make sure 
they are up to dateOnce you have a pathway established, 
create posters or brochures that explain 
how it works. Make sure the community 

partners you identified above have copies 
of those materials. Keep a list of the 
organizations with whom you’ve shared 
those posters, so that when you update or 
change them, you have a list of who you 
need to update. As finding 4 indicated, 
many reentering survivors don’t always 
respond well to traditional victim services 
language—brainstorm other ways to 
talk about experiencing sexual violence 
that don’t use terms like “survivor” or 
“perpetrator.” The resource below can be a 
strong asset for thinking about alternative 
methods of messaging sexual violence for 
these survivors. 

Resources

•Responding to Trauma Among Young Men of Color: Adapting the CrownHeights Approach for Your Community, by the Center for CourtInnovation: courtinnovation.org/sites/default/files/documents/
Responding To TrauamaAmongYoungMenOfColor_Revised.pdf


Phase 2: Serving Clients 
Successfully 

As we saw in finding 1, many formerly 
incarcerated survivors have complex 
trauma histories that may involve 
multiple assaults over a long period of 
time; they have often learned to survive 
by not disclosing their survivor status 
or not talking about their experiences. 
Because of that, even if survivors have 
come to your agency for assistance, they 
may be reticent to open up about their 
experiences or not feel comfortable with 
that process initially. Staff who work 
directly with this population may want 
to think about their time with these 
survivors in two phases: the first phase 
is building rapport with the survivor 
and laying the foundation for a longer 
relationship. These sessions may not 

involve providing traditional services as 
much as they focus on ensuring that the 
survivor gets to know the staff member 
with whom they’ll work, that you won’t 
stigmatize them, and that your staff will 
listen to them. Trust is essential in these 
relationships, and having the opportunity 
to spend some initial time building 
trust makes the second phase (actually 
providing the support) much more 
functional. 

Trust is essential in 
these relationships.

Once a rape crisis center has gotten 
all its staff on one page about 
working with former prisoners, created 
relationships with trusted reentry 
organizations, and built a pathway for 
incarcerated survivors to get to the 
organization, the next step is serving 
those clients successfully. 

Obviously, any rape crisis center wants to 
serve all of its clients successfully, but for 
this population in particular, the word-
of-mouth referral network is incredibly 
important. The better the experience a 
reentering survivor has with a rape crisis 
center, the more noticeable the knock-on 
effect will be for ongoing referrals. 

1)Build rapport with formerly incarcerated people

49
50
Recommendations for 
building rapport with formerly 
incarcerated people

Show genuine compassion firstAs we learned in finding 1, almost 
everyone who goes through the 
correctional system experiences 
dehumanization. One of the first and 
most important ways to build rapport and 
trust with a new reentering survivor is to 
treat them like a human. 

Many of these techniques are the same as 
how most rape crisis centers would treat 
any survivor or client, but emphasizing 
them with reentering survivors can help 
set a tone of respect and empathy. Some 
techniques to do this: 

•Asking reentering survivors what they’d like to be called shows that we intend to treat them like normal people.
•Mirroring the language they use to describe their time inside shows that we are listening to them.
•Sufficiently training staff not to flinch or wince if they find out that a client was formerly incarcerated shows the client that we don’t think being incarcerated makes them abad or scary person.
•Train staff to be able to hear stories about prison sexual violence.
•If it’s possible, try not to place a barrier (like a desk) between the staff and the survivor.

Validation is exceptionally importantBecause the violence many returning 
survivors have faced in the system is so 
normalized, they may have a hard time 
understanding their own reactions to it 
or even recognizing it as violence. 

Letting them know that it’s normal to 
have reactions to violence, even if it’s 
routine, can help shed some light on why 
they have been feeling or responding 
the way they have. Especially for 
survivors who tried to get help inside the 
correctional system and didn’t get the 
aid they were looking for, sharing with 
them that the system’s response to their 
experiences doesn’t determine what 
happened to them can be a 
strong message. 

Using clinical language here may not 
be valuable, though. As we learned in 
finding 2, especially men might believe 
that experiencing sexual violence means 
they were less strong or tough (or maybe 

Rape crisis centers 
should treat this 
population as they 
would any survivor or 
client—like a human 
deserving compassion 
and care. 


51
that they were gay, which can often be 
used as a synonym for weak in prison). 
Connecting surviving sexual violence 
with surviving other forms of violence 
the survivor has mentioned can be a 
valuable analogy. For better or worse, 
other forms of violence are not branded 
in the same way that sexual violence is in 
prison. Prisoners who survive stabbings, 
beatings, gunshot wounds, or other 
violence are generally considered to 
be more respected than prisoners who 
haven’t been through those, or who 
survived sexual violence, even though the 
traumatic effects may be similar. 
Letting survivors know that getting 
through prison in whatever way they 
needed to make them resilient, and not 
weak, can help deconstruct assumptions 
about survivors. 

TransparencyThe consultants told us many times that 
being direct and transparent were strong 
ways to build trust. When working with 
reentering survivors, tell them exactly 
what all of your papers, forms, and intake 
documents are for, where they go, who 
can see them, and why you need them.
If your agency needs to determine 
whether a survivor has had experience 
with the correctional system, be 
transparent about why that question is 
relevant to what the organization does. 
The consultants were clear that they 
valued honesty and directness. 
Ambiguity can exacerbate the 
disorienting nature of reentry. If a client 
has been referred to your agency, let 
them know exactly what will happen 
when/if they come in to see your team. 
When they arrive, ensure that someone 
in the agency is able to greet them. Even 
if they might need to wait for a moment, 
being able to affirmatively welcome 
them to your space reduces ambiguity 
and anxiety. Let them know how long 
they might have to wait. 

If you need to make a referral to another 
agency for a survivor, call the provider 
on the phone with the person present 
to keep them fully in the loop, if that’s 
appropriate for your process and 
confidentiality rules. If it’s not, walk the 
survivor specifically through what you’re 
going to do to refer them, how you’re 
going to do it, and who they should 

Validation and 
transparency are key 
to building trust with 
reentering survivors. 
Honesty, directness, and 
clear communication 
reduces ambiguity 
and anxiety. 


52
connect with at the other agencies that 
you refer them to. 

Provide concrete assistanceWe heard from the consultants that 
showing reentering people that you 
can provide them with some form of 
real, tangible assistance early in the 
relationship is an excellent way to 
build rapport. 

This concrete assistance didn’t need 
to be huge. It could be something to 
help them get back to your office, in 
the form of a bus pass, cab voucher, or 
other transportation support; it could be 
something that helps them address their 
essential needs like a grocery store gift 
card; it can also be a paper with specific 
referrals written on it. Making sure that 
the client can see your staff actively 
assisting them will build trust quickly in 
the early stages of the relationship.

Go behind the wall, if possibleWe learned in findings 3 and 4 how 

important trust and relationships are 
for people returning home. Association 
programs like NA and AA came up 
frequently as examples of programs that 
were able to build that form of trust with 
reentering people, primarily by meeting 
with them and building relationships 
before survivors started the process of 
coming home. 

To the extent it is feasible for a center 
to form a partnership with the local 
correctional agencies in their service 
area that will allow them to spend 
any time inside the facility interacting 
with survivors, doing so will allow 
them to build those kinds of trusting 
relationships. Any opportunity to create 
more consistent avenues for interaction 
between rape crisis center staff and 
incarcerated survivors will help to reduce 
stigma, shatter preconceived notions 
about people who are incarcerated, and 
build empathy.

Resources

•“My Name is Joe” video from Just Detention International.
Although this video focuses on an advocate working with asurvivor who is still incarcerated, the importance of validationand empathy for this population comes across very clearly. 
justdetention.org/multimedia/my-name-is-joe/


53
Once staff are able to establish a strong 
relationship with a returning survivor, 
this next step focuses on techniques 
for ensuring strong longer-term service 
provision for this population. Most 
service providers have process models 
for how they execute their services with 
individual clients. 

Clients who have experienced 
incarceration are still clients, and much 
of what service providers do with any 
clients will still be relevant for how they 
should serve clients with a history in 
the correctional system. However, we 
know from finding 3 that reentering 
survivors are also facing huge anxiety 
and challenges in daily life that can make 
keeping regular appointments difficult. 

Adapting your agency’s normal process 
model slightly can make it easier to take 
some of these realities into consideration. 

Recommendations for 
enhancing services with 
formerly incarcerated people

Use a modified empowerment model 
Many rape crisis centers operate under 
some version of an empowerment or 
survivor-directed model, where the 
agency helps highlight decision making 
opportunities for survivors. 

For this population, that model is 
incredibly valuable and important, 
because of the lack of options and agency 
they experienced while incarcerated. 
However, information overload is a 
very real concern and can spike the high 
anxiety reentering survivors are already 
facing. Discussing small, very concrete 
options for agency and decision making 
can help make it easier for survivors to 
process a new reality. Work up to more 
complex or long-term decisions. 

Structure can be very helpful. One tool 
for helping to provide that structure 
is using an action plan with reentering 
survivors. To the extent your agency sees 
clients more than once, try to schedule 
multiple sessions at regular intervals and 
at the same time. 

Use a modified 
empowerment model 
and discuss small, 
concrete options for 
agency and decision-
making. This makes it 
easier for survivors to 
process a new reality.

2)Enhance client services


Provide a checklist of tasks for the client 
to address in between sessions (if they 
need to take action on specific things). 
Keep the sessions to a similar length. To 
the extent possible, sending reminder 
calls, texts, or e-mails (whatever the client knows how to use and is comfortable 
using) providing the reentering client 
with a notice that a session is coming can 
be very valuable for providing structure.

Ask the client what respect means for themMany reentering survivors, as we learned 
from finding 2, are in the process of 
trying to unlearn maladaptive survival 
techniques they learned in prison or jail. 
For some survivors, their instincts are 
still honed to recognize behaviors that 
indicate imminent danger inside—but 
those behaviors no longer mean the same 
thing on the outside. 

Asking reentering clients directly how 
they would like to interact with your staff 
during their time with you, and what 
kinds of behaviors make them feel unsafe, 
can help mitigate the chance that they get 
triggered. Some clients will understand 
this conversation best as a conversation 
about “respect”—what does respect mean 
to them, and how can you make sure 
they feel like your staff is showing them 
respect. 

54
Ask formerly 
incarcerated survivors 
what makes them feel 
respected. Respect often 
translates to safety for 
this population. 

SafetyAs is the case with most trauma-informed 
services, ensure privacy, confidentiality, 
and set the boundaries of the meeting, 
session, or service. Limit the amount of 
outside noise or stimuli that your staff 
have to manage during sessions.

If they need to answer phones or connect 
with walk-ins, make sure clients know 
that they will have these duties before 
starting the session. Likewise, if your 
agency expects to be working with a 
number of reentering survivors, think 
strategically about when to schedule 
them. Preferably, they won’t have to 
interact with each other in the waiting 
room or reception space in your office, 
especially if there are gang conflict 
concerns or parole conditions that 
prohibit interacting with any other 
former prisoners. 


55
Resources

•Report of the Reentry Policy Council (this document is very long).
The sections specifically covered under the sections devoted tomental health are most relevant: http://csgjusticecenter.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/Report-of-the-Reentry-Council.pdf


Phase 3: Maintaining a Strong 
Reputation 

Once a rape crisis center has 
prepared itself internally to work 
with reentering survivors and has started 
doing so, the last component of doing this 
work successfully is maintaining a strong 
reputation amongst the population. 
Part of maintaining that reputation is 
providing good service, but since that 

should be a given for all survivors, this 
section focuses instead on ensuring that 
an agency refers survivors only to other 
organizations that also effectively serve 
the population, and maintains strong 
partnerships with key community 
organizations. 

1)Build sustainable relationships with a network of providers

The majority of formerly incarcerated 
survivors will come to your agency either 
through your direct connection to them if 
you are able to form relationships with 
individual people before they transition 
back to the community, or through rela-
tionships with other agencies—primarily, 
reentry agencies. 

Once you have built a reputation for 
successfully serving this population, you 
need to be prepared to refer survivors to 
other agencies when issues arise that are 
outside the scope of a rape crisis center’s 
services. Being able to refer survivors to 
other agencies that are also well 
equipped to work with them and knowing 
how to make warm referrals go a 

long way toward building and maintaining 
trust with clients and the broader 
community of formerly incarcerated 
people. 

Recommendations for 
building sustainable 
relationships with other 
service providers

Know the services and screening 
requirements of other allied agencies 
that you work with 
Whatever your intake process looks 
like, let community partners that work 
with formerly incarcerated people know 
what it looks like. Be as clear as possible 
what limitations your organization has 

56
(for example, not being able to work 
with reentering people who are on a sex 
offender registry). 

Warm referrals are a good practice in 
general and are especially positive for 
this population. Obviously, having some 
of those relationships already in place 
before getting reentering clients is 
ideal. Have a consistent point person to 
connect with these other agencies. Even 
if this individual doesn’t work with 
survivors directly, ensure that they can 
help triage requests or intake processes 
to the staff who can. Consistency is 
incredibly valuable.

Ensure all providers in your network 
have some common training 
about working with formerly 
incarcerated people 
Many reentering people are nervous 
about facing discrimination and rejection 
from service providers. Verify that 
the other service providers to which you 
refer clients regularly have had some 
training or exposure to formerly 
incarcerated people. 

Connecting them with the same agencies 
you’ve used to train your own team (if 
the other agencies haven’t been trained) 
is a good first step. Invite them to tour 
facilities if you are also touring them.

Where possible and appropriate, ask 
survivors what other providers are 
valuable and provide good service. 
Maintain a list or database of those other 
providers that your clients have 
mentioned regularly as being good. 
Connect with them to find out what they 
do to welcome this population into their 
agency. 

Find ways to meet with partner 
agencies, either as a coalition or at a 
community meetingAs mentioned earlier, word of mouth is 
incredibly important in this field. Being a 
trusted partner to other agencies usually 
means showing up to their events or 
activities, learning their processes, and 
finding specific contacts to share with a 

57
Warm referrals, ensuring 
all network providers 
have some common 
training, and expanding 
the list of partner 
agencies are necessary 
to create and grow 
relationships 
with formerly 
incarcerated survivors. 


58
Resources

•The National Reentry Resource Center maintains a list of reentryagencies across the country: csgjusticecenter.org/nrrc/
reentry-services-directory•Just Detention International maintains a list of organizations thatprovide support to incarcerated survivors. These organizationsmay be natural allies depending on your agency’s location:
justdetention.org/service•The Family Matters Community of Care consortium, run throughthe Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, is a prototypical versionof this network of providers.

survivor when a referral need comes up. 
Where possible, having regular check-in 
meetings with these community agencies 
once or twice a year can ensure that the 
places most likely to send you referrals 

know how to explain it to the people they 
send your direction. If one exists in your 
area, a coalition of service providers that 
work with formerly incarcerated people 
can provide these regular meetings. 


You got to build a 
relationship with the 
people in the program. 
That helps build trust.

Formerly incarcerated listening session participant


Black teen girl with glasses standing outside in winter in front of a bike rack, smiling

Appendix 1: ORC 
and BARCC 

The Mayor’s Office of Returning Citizens (ORC) and the 
Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC)

Mayor's office of returning citizens logo
The Mayor’s Office of Returning Citizens 
(ORC) was established under Boston’s 
Mayor Martin J. Walsh in October 2017. 
The ORC assists returning citizens to 
reclaim their dignity and purpose while 
rebuilding their lives through positive 
choices, incentives, and opportunities.

The ORC is Boston’s dedicated municipal 
entry point for formerly incarcerated 
citizens and their families impacted 
by incarceration, seeking assistance 
with housing, employment, health care, 
and education. Through intentional 
partnerships, peer mentorships, and 
case management, the ORC connects 
returning citizens to a vast network of 
service providers while identifying and 
addressing gaps in service delivery.

Boston Area Rape Crisis Center Logo
Founded in 1973, the Boston Area 
Rape Crisis Center (BARCC) is the only 
comprehensive rape crisis center in the 
Greater Boston area and the oldest and 
largest center of its kind in New England. 
Our mission is to end sexual violence 

through healing and social change.
BARCC provides free, confidential 
support and services to survivors of 
sexual violence ages 12 and up and 
their families and friends. We work with 
survivors of all genders, and our goal is 
to empower survivors to heal and seek 
justice in ways that are meaningful to 
them. We meet the needs of survivors in 
crisis and long after, and we also assist 

61
them as they navigate the health-care, 
criminal legal, social service, and 
school systems. 

BARCC assists thousands of sexual 
violence survivors and their families, 
friends and communities each year, 
regardless of sex, gender identity, race, 
physical/developmental disabilities, 
income, ethnicity, class, religion, or sexual 
orientation.

We take the knowledge we learn from 
survivors and from current research out 
into the community. We work with a wide 
range of schools, campuses, community 
groups, institutions, and organizations. 
These include middle and high schools, 
colleges, police, health-care providers, 
businesses, and prisons and jails. 

Through our Incarcerated Survivor 
Support program (ISSP)34, we provide 
emotional support and resources to 
survivors of sexual violence who are 
incarcerated in Massachusetts to help 
them heal from assault and reduce the 
trauma of incarceration. 
We also train correctional institutions on 
how to effectively reduce and prevent 
sexual violence and how to work with 
traumatized survivors so that they 
can heal. 


99 Bishop Allen Drive 
Cambridge, MA 02139 
Phone: 617-492-8306Hotline: 800-841-8371 (24-7), 
barcc.org/chat (9:00 a.m.—
11:00 p.m. every day) 

twitter bird icon
Facebook icon
/barcc.org

instagram icon 
barcc.org

link icon
@barcc 
@barccofficial

Person's hands gripping a metal fence