Mayor’s Office of Re-Entry Strategy
Client: Chicago Office of the Mayor
Opportunity
16,000
Individuals return to their communities each year after serving time
$150,000
Estimated cost of recidivism per person
Each year, nearly 16,000 individuals return to their communities from serving time in county jail, Illinois Department of Corrections, and federal prisons. For most, reentry comes with enormous barriers: limited access to stable housing, employment, healthcare, and other foundational supports required to rebuild their lives. Despite the billions of dollars spent annually on incarceration, Illinois and the City of Chicago invest comparatively little in supporting individuals once they return home.
The consequences are stark. Nearly two-thirds of released individuals recidivate within three years, at an additional public cost of roughly $150,000 per person. Even more troubling are the human costs: people returning from incarceration experience a mortality rate 13 times higher than their demographically matched peers. These impacts fall disproportionately on Black communities—while Black residents represent less than 15 percent of Illinois’ population, they account for approximately 58 percent of the state’s incarcerated population.
Recognizing both the urgency and opportunity to do better, in the 2024 budget, the City allocated $5 million to establish an Office of Reentry. Of that total, over $4.5 million is designated for grants to delegate agencies, positioning the new office as a central coordinator and strategic driver of how the City supports returning residents.
The City re-established the Office of Reentry and appointed Joseph Mapp as the Office’s Director and began building out a small but focused team tasked with listening, learning, and shaping a long-term vision for reentry in Chicago. Civic Consulting Alliance was asked to help clarify the Office’s role, set priorities, and articulate a strategy that could guide both near-term investments and future growth.
Action
Civic Consulting Alliance partnered with the Office of Reentry and the Deputy Mayor for Community Safety to help codify a comprehensive, integrated, and prioritized strategy for the Office’s work. This included:
Articulate ambition statements and value propositions: Our team helped articulate a clear mission, vision, and ambition, and to define the Office’s role within Chicago’s broader reentry ecosystem. This included distinguishing the Office’s responsibilities from those of other City and State agencies and aligning with advocacy bodies such as the Illinois Reentry Council. Together, we developed a compelling narrative that could be shared with policymakers, service providers, and community stakeholders to explain both the need for reentry support and the City’s role in delivering them.
Strengthen the Office’s fact base: Building on an extensive listening tour already conducted by the Office of Reentry, our team supplemented those insights with targeted interviews and structured analysis. We catalogued existing reentry services across the City, while also mapping connections to related mayoral priorities such as homelessness prevention, workforce development, and the People’s Plan for Community Safety.
“Through a structured collaboration with Civic Consulting Alliance, we translated lived experience, policy expertise, and operational reality into a codified strategy that now anchors the Office of Reentry’s work.”
Define an “ideal future state” for reentry services: We leveraged prior work from the Illinois Reentry Council, the former City Interagency Reentry Council, and existing research, including the Roadmap for a Second Chance City, to outline what a fully coordinated, equitable reentry system could look like. From there, we identified critical gaps between current services and that future vision, generating a backlog of potential initiatives for City leadership to consider.
Cross-Agency Communication: To move from analysis to action, we facilitated cross-agency working sessions that brought together the Office of Reentry, the Mayor’s Office of Community Safety, workforce leaders, and homelessness officials. These sessions helped prioritize near-term initiatives based on urgency, feasibility, and alignment with existing resources. We then translated those priorities into clear program charters and funding proposals, supporting the Office in articulating its 2025 budget needs and laying a strong foundation for fuller participation in the 2026 budget process.
“We are immensely appreciative of the partnership and dedication from Civic Consulting Alliance. Their support has been instrumental in establishing the strategic direction for the entire Mayor’s Office of Community Safety and our historic work. CCA has taken that same approach to the Office of Reentry, together, we are building a stronger, more equitable pathway to successful reentry for the communities we serve. We are proud to partner in this important work and look forward to continued collaboration. ”
Impact
Through this partnership, the Office of Reentry emerged with a clearer identity, a stronger strategic foundation, and a practical roadmap for action. City leaders now have a shared understanding of how reentry fits within Chicago’s broader public safety and community investment goals, and how limited resources can be sequenced to achieve the greatest impact.
Most importantly, this work positioned the Office of Reentry to move beyond start-up mode and into sustained implementation, helping ensure that Chicago’s returning residents are met not with fragmented systems, but with coordinated support, dignity, and opportunity.
The Office of Reentry released a one-year report on the partnerships and initiatives taking root to give returning residents the best possible chance to become successful, engaged members of Chicago’s community.
More recently, the office also released a Youth Guidebook, a comprehensive resource designed to support young people returning to their communities from the criminal justice system. The guidebook connects system impacted individuals and their families with tools and trusted resources to support reentry including legal support, housing assistance, educational opportunities, mental health services, and employment opportunities.