SAFE House Replication Model –
A New Way of Life
The SAFE (Sisterhood Alliance for Freedom and Equality) Housing Network is creating a national model for decarceration and building toward a future without prisons. The SAFE Housing Network is a national collective of formerly incarcerated people working to incarcerate the US by bringing people home to stay, helping them to heal from the trauma of incarceration, and empowering them to lead in the fight to end mass incarceration. By providing supports and allowing individual healing, we are breaking the cycle of incarceration that is the result of immense and widespread barriers to life after conviction. Through leadership development, we are expanding, and centering the formerly incarcerated within, the movement to end mass incarceration and build a future without prisons. The SAFE Housing Network centers women, LGBTQ people, children, and family within the movement to end mass incarceration and its mission to bring people back home. The SAFE Housing Network advances incarceration through community-based, gender-responsive reentry pathways that affirm the identity and full potential of each individual returning home. We uplift a national model for wraparound reentry support services that are flexible enough to meet the unique needs of every person. The model is an innovative, holistic program, first envisioned and designed for women experiencing reentry by women who have experienced reentry.
As mostly women who have made the reentry journey ourselves, we know what it means to return home from incarceration and what it takes to succeed after incarceration. It takes healing, stability, and opportunity. The criminal legal system actively undermines all of these in countless ways, which not only impacts people’s ability to stay free but also creates a second-class citizenship for formerly incarcerated people. Funding must be reallocated from corrections and law enforcement to community programs that work to bring people home and support them through reentry. The criminal legal system—from law enforcement to courts to jails and prisons to probation and parole—has failed to recognize and embrace the reality of the lives of the formerly incarcerated and instead continue to stigmatize, marginalize, and further punish us long after we’ve served our time. Community-based reentry efforts acknowledge and actively address the trauma of incarceration, do not further traumatize people, and provide desperately needed trauma-responsive care. All barriers to basic human needs and stability must be removed. People leaving prison or jail should have immediate access to identification and vital documents, safe and affordable housing, quality medical and mental healthcare, public assistance programs, educational programs, and decent jobs that pay livable wages. We must end family separation by incarceration and ensure paths for speedy family reunification and alternatives to incarceration that keep families together. The criminal legal system and our social services systems, too often, reflect the ugly history of American institutions that have used policy to separate and destroy Black families. Departments of Child and Family Services must not treat formerly incarcerated women as the enemy and instead value keeping families together.
"Turning Point is proud to be part of this!"
The women at the SAFE home have access to a wide range of services both on-site and through community partnerships. We focus on their immediate and long-term needs, including mental health, employment, and social services. Each woman receives a personalized support plan to help her.
Community partners provide services such as holistic medicine, academic support, vocational training, leadership programs, and opportunities for volunteering and community involvement.
