In the United States, some 12 million people are released from jails or prisons every year.

What happens to these ex-cons - and their families - after they've done their time depends heavily on whether they can find paying jobs to help them make their way back into society.

That's when the New Jersey Reentry Corporation steps in.

With offices throughout the state, the nonprofit offers job training, counseling, social work services and legal support to help these men and women get back on their feet.

The corporation also offers them a vision of what their new futures look like. And sometimes we mean that literally.

Most recently, Kedar Hall got out of prison, only to confront a stark reality: He was losing his eyesight.

Fortunately for him, former Gov. Jim McGreevey, who heads up the corporation, was there to lend Hall his own glasses. Then the agency helped arrange for Hall to get new prescription glasses, in effect allowing him to take the first steps toward his new life.

"This here is a second sight, this is a second chance," the grateful ex-prisoner said recently at the opening of the organization's ninth office, this one in a basement in downtown New Brunswick.

Already operating out of Elizabeth, Hackensack, Jersey City, Kearney, Neptune, Newark, Paterson and Toms River, the NJRC works with about 2,500 formerly incarcerated clients. The number is expected to grow as more people are released from prison in the next few years.

The organization began life as a pilot program in Hudson County in 2014, with support from the Christie Administration.

Since then, the U.S. Department of Justice has singled it out as being in the forefront in the reentry field; the program is one of only seven in the country recognized by the National Institute of Justice, the research, development and evaluation agency of the Justice Department.

Many ex-inmates will run up against seemingly insurmountable challenges: finding housing, finding a job, dealing with health issues and addictions, readjusting to family life after months or years behind bars.

The odds are stacked against them. The Reentry Corporation exists to help even out those odds. Everyone in the state benefits if the mission succeeds.

The daily expense of supervising a probationer is 20 times less than the average cost of supervising a person in jail, according to the organization's research. Teaching a client how to find a job - and how to keep it - helps guarantee that the individual will stay on the right side of the law.

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