LIFE Progressive Services Group works with returning citizens to provide assistance in their transition back into society.
At our Mount Vernon offices, we provide:
- Computers to facilitate career development, job training and job search.
- Wardrobe assistance to support the job search process.
Re-entry Transitional Program
The two main goals of re-entry programs are to support the efforts of the formerly incarcerated individual in finding and maintaining employment and to help those same individuals avoid recidivism. As reported in the U.S. Department of Labor research report, Ready4work, mentoring in conjunction with other services (i.e., employment and case management services), may offer the most promising approach to reintegrating the returning citizen into the community.
Recidivism is often abetted in the short term by irrational thinking and in the long term by the inability of the formerly incarcerated citizen to find work. Since one cannot determine the time it will take to find employment, housing, or attain any of the services that a returning person may need, a mentoring program that encourages resilience in the face of adversity will serve the formerly incarcerated well.
LIFE Progressive Service’s mentoring service is based in the philosophy of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), a form of cognitive behavioral therapy. The mentoring services explore attitudes toward work, consequential thinking, responsibility, developing family trust, addiction, and trauma, among other issues as needed. The principles of REBT are being adopted as a philosophy of self-help, based on the methodology of the influential psychotherapist Albert Ellis.
The methodology of REBT has five steps.
- A is an activating event, something happens (you lose a job or you fail a test).
- B is the belief or what you tell yourself about the belief (you ask a friend to borrow money to take your dog to the vet because it is sick. The friend says I don’t have it. The dog dies and you believe it is your friend’s fault).
- C is the consequence of the belief (you are now angry at your friend for something he did not do).
- D is the disputation of the belief (my friend said he did not have the money. When I ask, if he has it to give, he usually gives it to me.
- E is the result of the disputing of your old belief (you no longer believe that it is your friends fault that your dog died and you are not angry at your friend).
REBT can be utilized as a corrective to much of the irrational thought associated with high rates of recidivism and it is useful in the correction of non-productive thought on issues ranging from addictions to lifestyles of mal-adaptation.