I've been passionate about re-entry and reducing recidivism for many years. A GED classroom was my introduction to the people hidden inside our prisons, and after working with my students, I wanted to do something. In 2003, I founded a statewide voter education project for people with a criminal history. Most people at that time thought they were disenfranchised for life, which wasn't true. A few years later I worked with a nonprofit agency to produce and write the first statewide re-entry guide for people leaving Colorado's prisons. It's known as the GO guide, but the official title is Getting On After Getting Out: A Reentry Guide for Colorado. I also wrote Interviewing and Hiring Applicants with a Criminal Record: A Guide for Colorado's Employers, and with a small grant from the Colorado Society for Human Resource Management distributed 5,000 copies.We built remerg.com in order to provide the thousands of people in Colorado's criminal justice systems with current re-entry information, guidance, and hope. Almost 10,000 people are annually released from Colorado's prisons, tens of thousands exit Colorado's jails, 80,000 are on probation, and over 4,000 are in halfway houses. That's a lot of people looking for jobs, housing, food, clothing, and much more, which is what remerg.com provides. HALF of the people currently released from Colorado's prisons fail to succeed and return to prison within three years. It's been estimated that each act of recidivism costs the state $150,000. Besides the personal cost of failure to the individual who returns to prison, the $150,000 estimate puts the real cost of recidivism to the state in the millions. Think of it: the state's cost of just TEN people returning to prison is $1.5 million! Recidivism helps to drive the (almost) billion dollar Department of Corrections budget, county budgets for jails, and judicial budgets for probation.