Stop Calling It Reentry. It's Reinvention:
A New Blueprint for Prosperity After Prison
By Khalil Osiris
Available now
Teaching a reentry week in your course? See the Book One course supplement for instructors
Turned 17 in Jail, Sentenced to Prison
from Boston University Metropolitan College
(During His Second Incarceration)
the Architecture
The System Is Still Measuring the Wrong Thing
For decades, we've focused on individual reentry. This book explains why that approach fails, and what we should be measuring instead: household stability.
Reentry programs focus on individuals
The current system measures job placements, not household outcomes.
The 2Gen Economy focuses on households
Shift the unit of change from the individual to the household.
One creates a revolving door. The other creates generational prosperity.
The difference is what we measure, and what we build around.
What You'll Discover
Why Individual Employment Isn't Enough
Employment without household stability creates a revolving door.
How Household Stability Changes Everything
When we invest in two generations simultaneously, we create exponential impact.
The Durability Economy Workforce Architecture Explained
The corrective architecture: what to measure, what to fund, what to build.
Real Strategies for Implementation
Evidence-based solutions that work for employers, funders, and policymakers.
Written from Lived Experience
Arrested at 16, turned 17 in jail, and sentenced to prison in 1976. Twenty years in prison for two separate convictions. Bachelor's and master's degrees from Boston University Metropolitan College earned during his second incarceration. Released in 1999 at age 40.
Twenty-seven years later, Khalil Osiris has spent decades studying the criminal justice and workforce systems from both sides, and built the corrective architecture.
His Psychology of Incarceration course and the textbook he co-authored have been a cornerstone of Wright State University's curriculum for over twenty years.
"I have studied this system from both sides of it."
Author & Founder, Khalil Osiris Consulting
Creator, Psychology of Incarceration Framework
Market Architect, The Durability Economy Workforce Architecture
The Book Introduces the Durability Economy Workforce Architecture
The corrective architecture that changes what we measure, what we fund, what employers own, what workforce boards reward, and what policymakers call return on investment.
It shifts the unit of change from the individual to the household, coordinating workforce, housing, child care, and education services across two generations.
Get the Book That Changes the Conversation
"Stop Calling It Reentry. It's Reinvention." Available now.
SCORE
Companion Tool: The Durability Index
Free Household Stability Scorecard
The Durability Index is the practical scoring tool that brings the book's blueprint to life. Use it to measure employment retention, housing stability, financial resilience, family connection, and justice-system stability at intake, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months.
Download the Free Scorecard →Continue Exploring
Khalil Osiris brings 27 years of workforce development consulting experience to every engagement. As a keynote speaker on criminal justice reform, he challenges systems and moves leaders to action. Visit the blog for research-driven insights on workforce architecture and the 2Gen Economy.
We Served the Sentence Too: What Justice-Impacted Families Know and the System Never Measured
While one person was counted, processed, and released, the people at home paid for the calls and the visits, absorbed the lost income, kept or lost the housing, raised the children under the weight of it, and planned a return the system never asked them about.
What they learned is knowledge. We Served the Sentence Too is voiced from the family side of the sentence. It puts hard numbers on what incarceration costs a household, what the children carry, and what the visit and the call actually do. It reviews the programs that tried to build the family in, honestly, including the ones with mixed results. And it asks the field to change four things: the unit, the evidence, the measure, and the family's role.
Inside: fourteen chapters in four parts; 73 graphics; a full evidence map; a resource directory for families.
The fourth book from the author of the REINVENTION Trilogy.
Formats: paperback, 6 x 9, 222 pages; Kindle. On sale December 1, 2026. The Kindle edition opens for pre-order on November 1, 2026.
Family Knowledge Map: A Workbook for the Knowledge No Intake Form Asks For
No intake form asks what your family knows. This workbook does.
Across five domains (money and costs; housing and logistics; children and care; navigating the system; the first ninety days), the Family Knowledge Map helps your household put down on paper what it already knows, so the next plan starts from your knowledge instead of someone else's checklist.
The questions never ask you to recount trauma, describe the offense, or explain the incarceration. Your map is built from your own answers. Nothing here is a grade.
Bring this map to the next conversation about the plan. The family was always part of the plan. Now the plan can see it.
Formats: print edition, 8.5 x 11, 80 pages (retail perfect-bound; a lay-flat premium edition is sold direct); fillable PDF. Companion to We Served the Sentence Too; works on its own.
Available Now
Lived Experience Is System Intelligence
A New Architecture for Redesigning Justice, Workforce, and Family Systems
What happens when the people closest to the problem become co-designers of the solution?
This book introduces Lived Experience Is System Intelligence (LESI), a new architecture for integrating the knowledge of system-impacted individuals into workforce design, policy development, and institutional governance.
At its center is a recognition ladder that names what most systems leave unnamed: the difference between putting a justice-impacted person on a panel and giving that person genuine design authority. From narrative mode at the bottom to fully Rendered LESI at the top, it gives organizations a shared language for how far they have actually gone. For employers, funders, policymakers, and practitioners ready to redesign systems, not just reform them.
You cannot build a system around something you cannot measure. LESI is how you measure it.
Where REINVENTION told the human story, LESI gives you the measurement, the instrument that makes a durable system possible.
By Khalil Osiris · Published by Khalil Osiris Consulting
Available now
The Durability Economy
A Blueprint for Household Stability, Fair-Chance Employment, and the 2Gen Economy
Teaching this material?
Bring The REINVENTION Trilogy into a course, cohort, or training program. The free Instructor Sampler lets you inspect the teaching approach and a worked Durability Index exercise before requesting print exam copies.
You do not need to buy a book first. If your interest is organizational implementation, start with consulting.
The Durability Index is a proprietary teaching instrument. It has not been created, reviewed, approved, or endorsed by CSWE or ACJS.
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