Little or No Chance

 For individuals who have been convicted of a crime and served their sentences, society is still deeply unwelcoming. Good luck finding a decent job, although recent labor shortages may have opened a small crack in the door for a few, especially in the area of fighting wildfires. The ability to live a normal life is, however, otherwise almost universally severely impaired. What got someone into prison is a long forgotten contributing factor. It’s particularly difficult for someone from a gang-infested neighborhood, punctuated by terrible public schools and peer pressure to reach for easy money and often from a single parent family. According to a report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics released on August 26th, based on a 10-year study, the resulting recidivism rates are still staggering:

• About 66% of prisoners released across 24 states in 2008 were arrested within 3 years, and 82% were arrested within 10 years.

• The annual arrest percentage among prisoners released in 2008 declined from 43% in Year 1 to 22% in Year 10. 

• About 61% of prisoners released in 2008 returned to prison within 10 years for a parole or probation violation or a new sentence.

• Sixteen percent of prisoners released in 2008 were arrested within 10 years outside of the state that released them.

Hard numbers. And while most criminal activity fell during the pandemic, murder rates increased by a terrifying 30%. Alabama is even using $400 million of federal pandemic subsidies to build and improve their prison system. The cost of incarcerating inmates is equally staggering, and in January of 2017, the Prison Policy Initiative told us that the aggregated annual direct cost of $82 billion woefully understates the true cost of incarceration by a whopping $100 billion:

“The cost of imprisonment — including who benefits and who pays — is a major part of the national discussion around criminal justice policy. But prisons and jails are just one piece of the criminal justice system and the amount of media and policy attention that the various players get is not necessarily proportional to their influence… In this first-of-its-kind report, we find that the system of mass incarceration costs the government and families of justice-involved people at least $182 billion every year.” That the United States represents just 4% of the world’s population yet accounts for 25% of the earth’s prison inmates tell you we are definitely doing something wrong, probably well beyond our dramatic legally sanctioned lack of gun control.

To make matters worse, the general practice of releasing an inmate, sometimes to a halfway house, with little more than the standard $200 and a bus or train ticket, certainly makes recovery to a normal life that much more difficult, especially for inmates with no solid family support on the “outside.” Writing for the September 28th FastCompany.com, Kristin Toussaint explains a new program that is intended to help get a better fresh start:

“In California, a law allows prosecutors to recommend incarcerated people for release if that person received a particularly excessive sentence, or has shown that they’ve rehabilitated themselves while in prison. Now, 50 people who are released under that law will be part of a test: What happens if they also get direct cash assistance—$2,750 spread out over three payments—in order to set them up for success as they re-enter society.

“The cash payments are part of a pilot program from For The People—a nonprofit that works with prosecutors to resentence and release people under the state’s prosecutor-initiated resentencing law—and The Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), a nonprofit that provides employment training and other services to those just coming home from prison.

“The idea is that this kind of cash assistance can help make sure newly released people have money in their pockets for everyday needs, but it could also ‘build confidence among prosecutors and judiciary to say, ‘Yeah, we will release this person, now that we know they have services and money, we feel more comfortable making that release,'’ says Center for Employment Opportunities CEO Sam Schaeffer. ‘That to us is a really exciting idea, how cash assistance could really help accelerate the depopulation of prisons and jails.’

“When someone is released from prison, they may get assistance when it comes to finding housing or figuring out transportation, but all the other expenses that come with reentering society—a cell phone so they can be reached for job interviews, or nice clothes for those interviews—are left to them.  While there is already the concept of ‘gate money,’ some cash for recently released people so they can get a bus pass or pay for a cab to work, that often totals just around $200—a number that Hillary Blout, founder and executive director of For The People, who also wrote that prosecutor-initiated resentencing law, says hasn’t been updated since the ’70s, and is often woefully inadequate. This pilot program gives people $2,750, an amount that Blout says has allowed one person to get a car (the program has already delivered cash to about five people), so he could get himself to job interviews.” This certainly is an interesting test program to keep tabs on.

California has banned “for profit prisons” in the state, but a federal court has already ruled that this limitation does not apply to federal incarceration, including federal undocumented immigrant detention facilities. The Biden administration is attempting to follow California’s path, however. There are other corrective measures afoot: decriminalizing marijuana possession (resulting in early releases and expungement of associated convictions from the record), shifting addiction out of prison programs and more realistic sentences (like eliminating the hard “three strikes” laws) as part of a serious reform of our criminal justice system. But the real fixes reside within society, where the criminal temptations and racial inequities begin.

I’m Peter Dekom, and since we have developed a criminal justice system that seems to have failed on every measurable level, we truly need a ground-up reexamination of the entire system.