FALL RIVER — Peter Kortright is going back to jail again.

Soon.

He is looking forward to it.

Kortright, the former president of the Fall River Chamber of Commerce, spends a lot of time these days dealing with crime and its consequences.

Readers called, asking what became of Kortright, who ran the Chamber from 2001 to 2008.

He is retired now. But at the end of a long and interesting work life, he has found a rewarding way to spend his leisure, Kortright said.

“I work in a couple of different areas now as a volunteer,” he said.

His primary focus is with a group that he was introduced to by Diana Reeves, the woman he married in 2017.

“We developed a prison re-entry program,” Kortright said. “We are working under the umbrella of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in Attleboro.

“We try to help people who are getting out of jail.”

Kortright, a native of Terre Haute, Indiana, is a master’s degree graduate of Harvard University’s program for regional and city planning.

He arrived in the city during a period of national economic expansion. The recession was just starting when he left to form his own professional services and consulting business.

His whole working career seems tailor-made to prepare him for the volunteer work he does now, Kortright said.

“The chamber was a good place for me to develop my skills and learn to work with institutions,” he said. “It was a part of a continuation of experience that I’m still working on in my 60s.”

The prison re-entry program works closely with Sheriff Thomas Hodgson and the staff at the House of Corrections in Dartmouth.

“It is basic stuff,” Kortright said. “We ask, 'Do you need a ride? Do you need a driver’s license? Do you have a place to live? What kind of work do you do?'

“When people get out of jail, they are about 10 steps behind in terms of being successful, at least compared to what they were when then went in.”

Volunteers hold regular roundtables with social workers and members of the sheriff’s staff to figure out how to structure their program to best meet the needs of the inmates, Kortright said. It was a program that was once offered by the sheriff’s office, but has been eliminated because of budget cuts.

“We teach classes inside the jail,” Kortright said. “There is a whole curriculum designed to help people with reentry.

“There are 20 sessions, about 45 hours of class time. It is similar, in that way, to a college class.

“It helps people understand how they got where they are, what sort of skills they have to build on and how to make plans going forward.”

The program is called getting ahead while getting out.

“There is now a line, a sign-up line, among the inmates. They realize it is a good thing to have,” Kortright said.

The work, he added, has also given him a new view of incarceration.

“You learn how ordinary people get tangled up in bad decisions,” he said. “We should be spending at least half the money we spend on incarceration on rehabilitation and prevention.”

But that is a bigger issue, he said. His group, instead, focuses on helping one person at a time.

He said he is happy to do that.

“I have a lot of energy and I think I have a lot to offer,” Kortright said. “So I’m doing that. Plus, it needs to be done.”

Email Kevin P. O’Connor at koconnor@heraldnews.com.