Halfway house

A halfway house is a place that helps people with physical, mental, and emotional disabilities, giving them a place to live while they learn the social and other skills they need to live on their own or with assistance.

The house has staff workers from the health and helping professions, such as psychologists, social workers, and educators. They help the residents one-on-one or in groups, to adjust to more independent living. Some staff may live in the house. Some houses have large, same-sex dormitory rooms. Others have smaller rooms shared by several roommates, like living in an apartment or flat.

This word has been in use in the United States since the Temperance Movement in the 1840s.

Types

Halfway houses are normally either for patients or for criminals.

For patients, there are one of two choices. In one type, a patient is first placed into a large room with around fifty to one-hundred other people with the same disability as them. As the patients need less help from staff workers, they get moved into smaller rooms with less people, and at the end they are given their own place to live with no other people.

In the other type, new patients start in small rooms. As they need less help from staff workers, their rooms become bigger, and when they stop needing any help, they are living in the big room of 50 to 100 people.

Halfway houses for criminals, also called Community Corrections Centers or Community Correctional Centers, are places where criminals are put after they are taken away from prisons.