It’s hard to start a new life with only the clothes on your back and a check for $40, especially if you can’t even cash it because you have no ID. That’s how most people leave prison in the state of Washington today. With most having no place to go, less than a ninth-grade education, and few job skills, more than one-third will commit a new crime and return to prison within five years.

It’s a dismal statistic, but Harold Clarke, secretary of the state Department of Corrections, says it can be changed, provided DOC can change its culture—something even he isn’t so sure of.

Starting July 1, the DOC is launching a two-year, $25 million re-entry initiative aimed at helping offenders make it on the outside. The program, which came out of a state bill passed in April after a year-long study by a legislative task force, will provide more education, job training and treatment services in prison.

Criminal justice activists who worked on Senate Bill 6157 say it and the re-entry program are a good start, but criticize the focus: Instead of sharing the funding with community-based programs and support groups that help ex-convicts make the transition, the DOC plans to spend the $25 million on itself.

That includes doubling the number of community justice centers—or parole offices—around the state from six to 12 and adding five work-release centers to the 10 that DOC now operates.

At a recent public forum in Seattle, Clarke said the department plans to hire more than 1,000 counselors, clinicians, and corrections officers — with guards’ salaries starting at $2,800 a month — in an effort that will require shifting the system’s focus from punishment to rehabilitation.

“This represents a major cultural shift for DOC,” Clarke told an audience at Seattle’s First AME Church on May 31—one, he said, that many employees didn’t sign on for when they were hired.

Clarke said offenders will get a personal re-entry plan at the start of incarceration, rather than at the end, based on a battery of tests that will assess their educational level, skills, mental health status, and drug and alcohol use.

If they don’t have a GED, they might be put in classes or fast-tracked for taking the test, says Anna Aylward, prison program administrator. More vocational classes will be added, and there will be more integration between prison job training and community college courses leading to a career.

She says the department is also looking at allowing those in work-release programs to be excused from getting a job if they’re enrolled in approved courses.

“The focus is changing from ‘get a job no matter what it is,’”Aylward says. “It’s got to be a living-wage job and it’s got to be a good job for you.”

As part of Senate Bill 6157, the state Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development has received $3.9 million for two pilot programs related to the re-entry initiative. One is a $288,000 program to set up a network of community transition support. The other is a $3.6 million program to house a small number of high-need offenders at two locations yet to be chosen.

Annie Conant, managing director of CTED’s housing assistance unit, estimates the housing pilot will serve 180 to 200 people over the next two years and likely involve payments to private landlords, with a limit of one year.

At the public forum, Clarke said there will be no funding for community-based re-entry efforts. That’s unfortunate, says Lea Zengage, executive director of Justice Works, a Seattle nonprofit that organizes ex-offender support groups. “They’re more effective,” she says. “They understand the challenges.”

Like leaving prison with no valid identification. Zengage says SB 6157 corrects that by allowing offenders to get a state ID card or driver’s license before they get out. The bill also allows inmates to put any savings they might have toward a deposit for an apartment prior to release—something the DOC didn’t allow in the past.

“Removing barriers to success is really mandatory and helpful to everybody,” Zengage says. “It’s taking care of people so they don’t commit new crimes.”