Comment: It’s easy to think of solving crime as simply a matter of imprisonment and the rehabilitation of prisoners when they are inside. But an important part of the criminal justice system is whether people reoffend after prison.
Successful rehabilitation depends on many factors. How we design and invest in our neighbourhoods is a key part of the equation and of making the community safe.
As a 2025 report from the UK’s Prison Reform Trust shows, reintegration is difficult. On top of the normal upheaval of moving places, there are high rates of poverty, and chronic health, mental health, and addiction recovery needs in the prison population. These don’t disappear when people leave prison.
Former prisoners not only need to find secure housing and work, they often need to re-establish family and social support networks, and meet parole conditions. The sudden change in environment can be overwhelming.
Consequently, reintegration is not just about the person who has left prison, it’s also about whether the environments they return to create obstacles to their reintegration.
Designing a community includes deciding where buildings and infrastructure are located, but also what facilities are provided. This is a fundamental role of local government, facilitated through the (soon to be replaced) Resource Management Act, which aimed to balance the needs of communities with the desires of property owners.
Housing of course is fundamental, but former prisoners also need access to a range of services to successfully reintegrate.
These services have been categorised as those that support immediate needs and those that promote upward mobility. They include housing and welfare support, healthcare services, food banks, addiction treatment, and legal services in the first category, and employment agencies, vocational training, and educational institutions in the second.
Research has identified the particular benefits of employment organisations, non-profit voluntary organisations, political advocacy groups, and family welfare organisations (such as healthcare organisations) in aiding reintegration as well as reducing crime.
For example, one 2017 study, drawing on 20 years of data from 264 American cities, found that for every 10 additional community organisations per 100,000 residents there were reductions in the rates of murder (9 percent), violent crime (6 percent), and property crime (4 percent).
Similarly, a 2013 study in the South Bronx in New York found that for each additional family welfare organisation, property crime reduced by 14 percent. In contrast, the presence of bars and liquor stores has been found to increase recidivism.
The positive outcomes have been attributed not only to the actual services providing support, but also to the social capital they embody and how they uphold common values and expectations of behaviour.
Additionally, advocacy groups are thought to mobilise extra political and economic resources for the community, and their physical presence may generate regular activity and informal surveillance discouraging crime.
Reducing the number of some organisations has been associated with increased recidivism. For example, studies in Chicago published in 2014 and 2015 found increases in recidivism associated with losses of educational and healthcare organisations.
But it’s not just the presence of community resources that matters. It’s also where they are located.
When potential jobs, family obligations, healthcare providers, and parole offices are not close, distance can cause additional stress, missed appointments, late arrival at work, and breaches of parole conditions. Consistent with this, Californian research from 2010 found that when social service providers were within 3.2 km of a parolee’s home, the likelihood of recidivism reduced by 41 percent. Data from New York State has also shown that a high density of non-profit organisations in a community is associated with reduced recidivism.
Consequently, the tendency to design car-dependent neighbourhoods, where facilities and services are reduced in number, spread out, and far from homes, can challenge prisoner reintegration—particularly if public transport is poor and there is no access to a car.
One former prisoner, quoted in US sociologist Andrea Leverentz’s 2022 book on prisoner reintegration, left home at 4 am each day, taking three buses, and walking for an hour to get to work on time. The express bus would have cost an extra $4 each day, but that was too much for his budget.
Improved access to public transport thus helps with reintegration because it expands job opportunities and makes getting to work, support programmes, and services easier.
Of course, with a population vulnerable to housing insecurity, proximities between work, home, and support services can frequently change. Similarly, the protective effects of organisations take time to develop and can change because of an organisation’s resources affecting its effectiveness. Likewise, when services are over-subscribed their impact on recidivism lessens.
Making communities safer won’t happen by simply criminalising individuals. We need to design and invest in our neighbourhoods to make it easier for people to reintegrate successfully and not reoffend.
This article was originally published on Newsroom.
Christine McCarthy is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Her research areas include prison architecture. From 2018 to 2020, she was president of the Wellington Howard League for Penal Reform.