Mission and Philosophy

Span’s Mission

Our mission is to assist people who are or have been in prison to achieve healthy, productive, and meaningful lives. We provide professional services tailored to the individual situation that supports empowerment, recovery, and health.

Door Sign to Span's first Office

Laurie Bloom, Span's Associate Executive Director

Span’s Philosophy

We treat people with dignity and respect, which encourages them to take advantage of the life-changing tools we offer. Through this process our clients become assets and are no longer liabilities to our communities.

Breaking the cycle of addiction, crime, and imprisonment benefits everyone: victim, offender, families, and communities. This work has a more positive long-tem impact on the human and fiscal costs of crime than systems that serve as only temporary solutions to serious problems.

Providing Fiscally Responsible Solutions

The cycle of imprisonment is expensive. Taxpayers bear the brunt of the exorbitant price tag of housing inmates. A community’s economy suffers when it loses the valuable contribution of workers now lost to the prison system. We believe that the cost of providing Span services to assist a client from staying out of prison is nominal compared to the direct and indirect costs of incarceration.

Making Communities Safer

Communities not only suffer financially from the cost of re-incarceration, but they suffer from the physical and emotional toll of the revolving cycle of crime as well. Criminal behavior creates victims, makes people feel unsafe, and shatters families. We believe that by providing those who have been in prison with the tools they need to avoid returning to criminal behavior the overall crime rate will be lowered.

Helping Those In Need

The more than 630,000 men and women who are released from federal and state prisons every year need our help. These men and women are our brothers, sons, mothers and daughters. They are our friends and our children. The majority of the formerly imprisoned struggled with poverty, homelessness, illness and addiction before they entered prison and they continue to struggle with these issues once they are released. We believe it is our duty to help former prisoners find constructive solutions to these problems because every one deserves the opportunity to live a healthy, productive and meaningful life.