DEPARTMENT: None
DEPARTMENT HEAD: Dr. Kevin Downey, Crosspoint Chief Executive Officer
COUNCIL DISTRICTS IMPACTED: All Districts
SUBJECT:
Briefing on Crosspoint
SUMMARY:
Crosspoint, a residential support services provider, serves individuals released from federal prisons. Crosspoint is looking to fill this critical service gap by opening a 100-bed residential reentry center for those citizens returning from state prison. While this is definitely insufficient to fully address the service gap, it will provide essential programming for those individuals with the highest risk of recidivism. Crosspoint is looking to fill this critical service gap by opening a 100-bed residential reentry center for those citizens returning from state prison.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
Crosspoint has been providing residential support services for a wide variety of San Antonio citizens since 1963 when it opened its first center for those individuals transitioning out of State Hospital. In 1972, Crosspoint began providing residential transitional services for both state and federal prison releasees. Due to capacity issues, the organization stopped providing state offender services in 1996. Community corrections were subsequently expanded to US Probation and US Pretrial Services populations. In the mid-80s, Crosspoint began providing residential support services for homeless Veterans. In the time since, the organization has opened two clinics to render outpatient mental health and addictions treatment services, a support home for homeless women in early recovery and residential support services for Bexar County offenders. In December 2017, Crosspoint opened a Behavioral Health Diversion Program for Bexar County Pretrial and Specialty Court referrals. Our previous history serving state offenders and the critical nature of today’s service gap leads us back to reestablishing another such residential transition program.
Approximately 7000 formerly incarcerated citizens return to San Antonio from state and federal prisons every twelve months. Crosspoint currently serves approximately 500 to 600 of these returning citizens in their residential reentry centers every year. These centers currently serve only those individuals released from federal prisons. Since no local organization provides similar programming for state prison releasees, that means that roughly 6000 individuals are returning to San Antonio every twelve months from state prisons without benefit of residential transition services. Besides limiting the opportunities for addressing the challenges of community reintegration and successful family reunification, this clearly poses a public safety problem.
While this is definitely insufficient to fully address the service gap, it will provide essential programming for those individuals with the highest risk of recidivism. While the proposed TDCJ Reentry Center Program offers many challenges and extremely low margins, Crosspoint is always willing and sufficiently agile to adapt or develop services to meet the changing needs of our growing and evolving city. We look to our city leaders for their guidance in the process of identifying suitable siting and building a sufficient level of support to address this and other critical community needs so that we can continue to make our city safer and stronger.
ISSUE:
The public benefits of this residential reentry program for state offenders includes addressing mental health issues and substance use disorders in the community, restoring lives, rebuilding families, enhancing public safety and strengthening our local economy by filing vacancies with a largely untapped highly motivated workforce.
ALTERNATIVES:
This memo is for briefing purposes only.
FISCAL IMPACT:
This memo is for briefing purposes only.
RECOMMENDATION:
This memo is for briefing purposes only.