By Colleen Cronin
Boston Herald
BOSTON — The Massachusetts Department of Corrections just opened a new minimum security women’s facility, the only one in the state, to help inmates transition back into the community.
But the windows of the Reintegration House at Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Framingham aren’t lined with bars, like other facilities, they’re lined with flower boxes.
“It’s just a little bit more homey,” MCI-Framingham Superintendent Ryan Donlon said, standing in front of a round table in the house’s dining room. “It’s definitely not your traditional facility. It’s definitely a home.”
The two-story, wooden-shingled building can house up to 12 women, but the first cohort will have four to five inmates who’ll move in during the first week of August.
The women will be chosen based on factors like time left on their sentence, engagement with correctional staff, and interest in the program. They’ll be inmates getting close to their release date and in the midst of the reentry process.
To reacclimatize and reintegrate them, the home gives them the chance to cook for themselves, interact with others, including family, and generally be in a more normal setting, like they will be when they’re done with their sentences.
“We tried to make it so that they would feel more like they’re in the community than they are in a prison setting,” Donlon said.
DOC Commissioner Shawn Jenkins pointed to the normal beds and bedding, all the classic kitchen appliances (including a crock pot and a dishwasher), and the windows that don’t have barbed wired fences in their sight-line.
“If it wasn’t located on this campus, it would be in a neighborhood like anywhere else,” Jenkins said. “I do think it’s the first of its kind in the sense that it’s a home.”
Instead of traditional correctional officers, there will be two correctional program officers on site.
“They play more of an active role in the individual’s reentry program,” Jenkins said. The officers have an office upstairs, across the hall from a bunk room painted blue and decorated with colorful art.
There are cameras in the house, but only in the common spaces, not the bedrooms or the bathrooms.
The project cost $143,000 and took about eight months to complete, and Jenkins explained that the expenses were relatively low because the house, and the learning annex next door, were existing buildings on the campus.
Donlon lent some of his maintenance team to the project and inmates from Pondville Correctional Center and MassCor-Milford also worked on the buildings.
The Reintegration House is the fourth minimum DOC facility, Jenkins said.
Although that can’t always been the case, he said, “It’s ideal… in many ways, for people to be in these types of locations before release.”
One aspect he focused on was the opportunity for the women to have extended visits with their family.
“That re-acclimation process with your family, the normal things that you would do with your children, particularly for women, is really critical,” Jenkins said.
Next door to the house is a building where programming and visits will take place.
Both buildings have air conditioning, and the annex has a sitting area, yoga mats, and magazines. Jenkins said that it will be a place where kids can bring their homework, work on an arts and crafts project, and have more physical contact than might be allowed in the typical correctional setting.
On the grass in between, cornhole boards designed by the women were set up for a game.
Senate President Karen Spilka , whose district includes MCI-Framingham, said at the opening of the facility that it will “give them the best shot and reintegration at living long, healthy, productive lives once they’re back in the community.”
As a former social worker, she said that she’s seen a shift in how the state approaches incarceration, towards meeting people where they’re at instead of only focusing on punishment.
“We all win when we do that,” she said.
“The reintegration house and programming building will provide women a special opportunity to prepare for their return to our communities. But it’s much more than a new building. It’s an investment in public safety, a proud symbol of our belief in second chances,” said Executive Office of Public Safety and Security Secretary Gina Kwon .
“Those outcomes strengthen families,” she went on, “and make every community in Massachusetts safer.”
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