AUGUSTA – The Maine Department of Corrections has been awarded a $2 million grant to help inmates establish themselves once they get out of prison.

The money will be used to create a system where social workers, probation officers and employment services work together to help newly released prisoners.

Teams will begin working with prisoners up to a year before they are released, and help them get jobs, housing or schooling, in addition to mental health or substance abuse treatment once they are released.

The program, called the Maine Reentry Network, is designed to help prisoners more easily make the transition into society and avoid the behavior that sent them to prison in the first place.

“It will significantly advance what the department has always had as part of its long term vision – doing more community corrections,” said Denise Lord, associate commissioner for the Department of Corrections.

The grant comes from a $100 million national program called the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative, which seeks to increase public safety and reduce pressure on prison populations by helping ex-convicts outside of prison.

The money will cover startup and three-year operating costs to establish the program in Androscoggin, Knox, Penobscot and Washington counties. The department estimates that about 150 high-risk offenders between the ages of 16 and 25 are released each year into communities in those counties. Lord said the program could expand to the rest of the state if it succeeds in those counties. Convicts are at a high risk of committing crimes after they are out of the prison system.

A study by the Department of Justice, which oversees the program, found that roughly half of the 272,000 people released from prison systems in 15 states in 1994 were rearrested within three years, and that those people accounted for 4.9 million arrest charges.

Maine already brings together service providers to help juvenile offenders resume schooling or find a job and safe housing once released from juvenile facilities, Lord said. The state will try to use some of those same techniques for working with older offenders, she said.