News - 2008
Community Education Centers, Inc. Celebrates Expansion of the Albert M. "Bo" Robison Assessment and Treatment Center
West Caldwell, NJ, May 23, 2008 - Community Education Centers, Inc. (CEC), the nation's leading provider of offender reentry and in-prison treatment services, is celebrated the expansion of its Albert M. "Bo" Robinson Assessment and Treatment center in Trenton, New Jersey. The facility expansion added 480-residential reentry beds raising the total capacity of Bo-Robinson to 900-beds. Since opening in 1997, over 23,000 male and female offenders have passed through the facility's classrooms, lecture halls and assessment offices.
Chairman and CEO of CEC John J. Clancy said, "This expansion represents our dedication to changing the lives of offenders in southern New Jersey. Bo Robinson plays a vital role in helping offenders reenter society and stay out of the corrections system. We are proud of the work accomplished at Bo Robinson in helping thousands of people improve their lives, and we're pleased to have played an important role in the State of New Jersey seeing a decrease in its prison population over the last decade.
"The successes of Bo Robinson were recently highlighted in an article, "Criminal Recidivism of Female Offenders: The Importance of Structured, Community-Based Aftercare," which was published in the April/May edition of the peer reviewed journal, Corrections Compendium. The research article found a 50% reduction in recidivism for female offenders participating in the Bo Robinson female offender reentry program compared to a similar group of female offenders from the New Jersey Department of Corrections (NJDOC).
The results of this outcome-based study, done in coordination with Drexel University and the NJDOC, not only show how effective reentry programming can reduce recidivism, but also how the State of New Jersey can reap the cost savings benefits as less offenders return to prison. Fewer arrests translate into fewer hours spent by police, prosecutors, and judges, which alone has the potential to generate substantial cost savings. Additional savings are realized by the lower cost of housing and treating an offender in one of our programs and fewer children being placed in foster care.
Bo Robinson, as noted in a 2006 report from the New Jersey Department of Corrections, has also been instrumental in maintaining public safety for New Jersey's community release programs by carefully prescreening offenders' suitability for community placement.
The NJDOC report, "A Seven-Year Analysis of Walk-Away Rates of the New Jersey Halfway House Program," found that since the inception of the assessment and treatment model in New Jersey, the annual decreasing rate of walk-aways was an astounding 39%.
CEC's Clancy concluded, "I look forward to continuing the successes of Bo Robinson, reducing recidivism and keeping our communities safer, through our new expansion. Statistics show that building more prisons is not the answer to solving the problem of recidivism. The answer, in our view, is for Departments of Corrections nationwide to partner with organizations such as ours to help individuals permanently reenter society. We celebrate the Bo Robinson expansion today as one small example of how government and the private sector can successfully work together to solve a large and growing problem in the United States."
About Community Education Centers, Inc.
Community Education Centers, Inc. (CEC) is a leading provider of offender reentry and in-prison treatment services in America, operating in 22 states, with 22,000 individuals in our daily care. CEC provides a full range of therapeutic residential and non-residential reentry services with a record of reducing recidivism.
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