About two dozen men wearing green jump suits started their day slumped in the pews of a chapel of Rikers Island on Wednesday. Each was recently convicted of a crime and sentenced to up to a year in jail.

A fast-talking correction officer told them to “keep their heads up and stay out of trouble,” and then four men from social services organizations spoke.

A representative of Samaritan Village said the men had entered the “American nightmare.” One from the Osborne Association told them, “Whatever is going on in your life, it’s not working.” Then, an older man in a black skullcap rose and gave the final speech.

“There are three things you can’t get back,” the assistant director of the Rikers Island Discharge Enhancement program, Khalil Abdur-Rahman, said, weighing each phrase ponderously. “A word spoken in haste. A bullet when it is released from the chamber of a gun. And a missed opportunity.”

Some of these men had already made the first two mistakes, but according to correction department officials, some of them can greatly reduce the chance they will end up on Rikers again any time soon.

About 75% of inmates return within one year, but of the men who stay with a set of programs designed to get them sober, properly housed, and attractive to employers for three months after they leave jail, only 23% return to Rikers Island in the same period, correction officials said this week.

“We’ve found that if individuals want to change their lives, it is a good thing to have those resources available to them,” the correction department commissioner, Martin Horn, said. “Most inmates, on the day they leave, are determined to do better. Most people don’t leave and say, ‘I want to be here again.’ Then that falls by the wayside at different points in time. The allure of crime looks good again.”

Mr. Horn said the beginning of an answer to the problems of recidivism can be as simple as making sure ex-offenders have their paperwork in order. Every inmate now leaves Rikers Island with a Social Security card and birth certificate. Officials were finding that many couldn’t get jobs immediately after leaving jail because they didn’t have the proper identification.

The correction department spends $11 million on discharge planning every year, most of which is paid to social service organizations based on their ability to get ex-offenders to stay with after-jail service programs for a full three months. The programs start while the inmate is in jail and continue through the moment he or she leaves, including a ride from Rikers Island on the day of release to a job site or a program office.

The problem is getting exoffenders to stick with it, officials said. Of 680 people who signed up for the after-jail services between July and December of last year, just 180, or 29%, stayed engaged. The average daily population on Rikers Island is 2,000.

“The majority of these detainees — 75 to 80% — have addiction histories, high rates of mental illness,” the executive director of the Fortune Society, JoAnne Page, said. “This is as close to success as you are going to get in this world.”

The deputy commissioner for programs and discharge planning, Kathleen Coughlin, described the discharge planning initiatives as a “work in progress.” The department is developing a set of performance indicators to measure aspects of recidivism and their impact on it.

“We are learning as we go with it,” she said. “There is no jail system in the country that is doing it at this level.”

An inmate, Arnaldo Rivera, 50, said it’s the first few days out of jail that set the tone for the months going forward. Rivera is serving a sentence for driving while intoxicated, but said he plans to change his life, possibly coming back to Rikers to work as a legal assistant to some of the men who don’t speak English.

“Within these four walls we can be whatever we want to be,” he said. “Outside it’s another story.”