How to Actually Stop Recidivism: The $100 Million Blueprint That Works

Our system expects people leaving prison to secure housing, employment, and healthcare immediately. It also forces them to navigate a fractured, adversarial bureaucracy to do it.

I served nearly a decade in federal prison for bank fraud. I walked out with a background in international finance and a strong external support system. Most of the men I served time with walked out with nothing but a bus ticket.

Watching that disparity made one thing very clear – surviving re-entry without a centralized support structure is nearly impossible. If we want to lower recidivism, we have to stop funding fragmented bureaucracies and start funding holistic blueprints.

The Friction of Re-entry

The standard American parole system demands stability but provides chaos.

Upon release, parole requires immediate compliance. A recently released individual must travel to one side of the city to report to their probation officer. They have to take two buses to a different borough to apply for SNAP benefits or Medicaid. They must find a third facility that offers mental health or substance use counseling, and rely on a deeply underfunded municipal agency to find a bed to sleep in.

This is a logistical trap. If a person misses a mandatory appointment because they cannot afford the subway fare—or because the corporate banking blacklists I detailed in my previous posts prevent them from legally cashing a paycheck—they violate parole. The system sends them back to a cell not for committing a new crime, but for failing to navigate an impossible bureaucracy.

The Holistic Model

We do not need to invent a new system to solve this. Founded in 1967, The Fortune Society in New York provides the exact model the rest of the country should be replicating.

Operating with an annual budget of roughly $100 million, The Fortune Society helps tens of thousands of formerly incarcerated people every year by fundamentally rejecting the fragmented government model. Instead, they use a “holistic” approach: they put every critical survival service under one roof.

When someone walks through their doors, they do not get a pamphlet and a list of phone numbers. They get transitional housing. At the Fortune Academy—known as “the Castle” in West Harlem—individuals immediately exiting the system are provided with pristine, safe apartments.

While the client is safely housed, they walk down the hall to enroll in high school equivalency programs, access mental health counseling, and get immediate administrative help securing state benefits.

The Proof of Concept

When you stop treating formerly incarcerated people like administrative liabilities and start providing them with centralized support, the results are undeniable.

Stanley Richards entered The Fortune Society as a client after serving time at Rikers Island. Because he was given a stable foundation rather than a bureaucratic maze, he rebuilt his life. He eventually rose through the ranks to become the CEO of the very organization that helped him.

Recently, his lived experience was recognized at the highest levels of city government when Mayor Eric Adams appointed him to serve as the Commissioner of Corrections for New York City.

We know exactly how to stop the cycle of reincarceration. We just have to fund the model that actually works.

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About the Author

Hassan Nemazee operated in international finance before serving a federal prison sentence. Today, he advocates for pragmatic and economically focused prison reform in America. He is presently on the board of directors for The Fortune Society.

Discover his full story in his memoir, Persia, Politics & Prison: A Life in Three Parts.

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