Re-entry simulation sheds light on parolee life

11/5/2025

By Lauren Royce, Editor
NEW MILFORD — The newly formed Susquehanna County Re-Entry Coalition hosted an event Oct. 28 with a re-entry simulation of what parolee life looks like at the Susquehanna County Public Safety Center. With about 10 different tables and a dozen or so different stations such as the courthouse, rehab center and food stamp bank, participants got to play a unique game of survival according to their case files.
“At the end, I ask if it’s challenging, and they’re like, yeah I failed, this was really hard,” said Penny Sines, a parole manager with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PADOC) in the North Central region. “But people that end up being successful realize they end up developing a routine.”
As a parole manager with over 20 years experience, Sines has seen it all: good endings, recoveries and relapses too. But everyone deserves a second chance, she said.
“Our chain of command went down south a couple years ago and saw this, and our executive directors said, we need to do this in re-entry,” Sines said. Now, volunteers in parole jobs help do this simulation in multiple places in the state. Many times, participants at other coalitions either know someone re-entering society from prison or parolees themselves come and verify the real struggle of trying again at life. Superintendents of state correctional facilities took part in early simulations in 2019 and quickly realized how poorly they performed when placed in the role of parolees.
“I tell the communities, look, they’re coming back to your communities whether you like it or not,” Sines said. “So, wouldn’t you rather them be re-entry prepared? And mindsets changed, so they’re not committing more crimes, they’re not reverting back to their criminal thinking.”
Ginny Smith is the executive director of the re-entry coalition. She said when she got the idea to start the coalition and have this event, she talked to Mary Brotzman, a Community Reentry Parole Agent with the Scranton District Office with PADOC. Smith met Brotzman at another coalition’s meeting in Pike County.
Commissioner Alan Hall welcomed everyone to the event and expressed the county commissioners’ support for the new program. While he could not stay, commissioners Dave Darrow and Bob McNamara participated and tried to keep out of “jail.”
“This is something new for Susquehanna County, we are diving into this with both feet,” Hall said. “We know that the bottom line is, we do not incarcerate our way out of the problem that we have. We know that when we look at these people that are being incarcerated, people that are going into the system, about 60-75% of those people have some type of mental health or addiction problem. The only way to fix that problem is to get them in a place to re-entry where they can get the help and services they need so they don’t continue to come back.”
The first round, a 15-minute interval of a “week,” Susquehanna County officials and residents were scrambling to hold onto their play tokens and money. Some needed to go take a drug test and hope for a negative drawn from a paper pile, others were tasked with getting clothes for their new job. Some people had more, less or no transportation tokens or play money, and some had to go get new IDs, all depending on what was in their folder. While it was possible to get out of the simulation with a job and money, it was not guaranteed.
David Spring is a social worker with SCI Muncy, a medium/maximum security prison for female offenders in Lycoming County. He was working one of the tables as participants paid in play money and coins to draw and see if they succeeded at therapy. Many times in real life, women did not leave the prison with any money or a job at all, so to exit the simulation with money or employment was more than what they got, he said.
“Years ago—well before I began working in this field—reentry was not a primary focus,” Spring said, and over time, “it became clear that emphasizing reentry efforts helps reduce recidivism.” Spring said the simulation was a good thing because it gives individuals a perspective of how difficult re-entry is.

There was a pawn shop table, which you could try your hand at bartering and negotiation. The legal table had a restitution station, where people could make payments as they would in real life.
As the third and fourth rounds progressed and finished, people were becoming hooked on trying to succeed, but the odds of getting a negative drug test doomed many. Some ran out of tokens and money, some lost jobs and had to go to the “homeless shelter.” At the end, there were mainly some questions on how housing works for parolees, and Sines explained that having a criminal background does not always mean you cannot get housing but it can be difficult.
Elizabeth Arnold, retired county commissioner and Melissa Fleming, Deputy Director at Northern Tier Regional Planning & Development Commission had also participated in the simulation. They were reflecting on how the simulation opened their eyes to the struggles parolees face in coming back to the outside world.
“It’s very eye opening to what people coming out of jail have to go through, what they’re doing to get their lives back on track,” Arnold said.
“It was very impactful,” Fleming said. “I think anybody that’s working with that population should have to go through this (simulation).”