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Each year, America spends about $68 billion to incarcerate and supervise more than 7 million people. Yet criminologists say our burgeoning penal system, which has tripled in size over the past 25 years, does little to improve public safety. What it has been most successful at is promoting poverty.
The lives of young inmates are shaped by a lack of public policy on re-entry. With the highest incarceration rate in the world, the U.S. releases more than 700,000 inmates each year, almost all of them barred from solid jobs because of their crimes.
John Page knows this through bitter experience. A drug addiction and subsequent crimes led to eight years in a Seattle-area prison. Afterward, though welcomed home by friends, and sober, he found himself permanently marked by his past. Despite a college education, solid office experience, and a lifelong ability to connect with people, Page, 46, discovered that the only work he could get upon release was an $8-per-hour job cleaning buses at night.
"I'd had all these expectations," he said. "I was aiming for jobs with the city, jobs with the county." No employer would give him a second look.
"It was horrible," he said.
Even now, four years later, Page still feels the chill of incarceration. He winces to recall the day he was invited to meet the managers at a Seattle utility company. His preliminary tests had so impressed Human Resources that a job seemed assured, company staff said. Dressed for the interview, Page arrived to fill out the paperwork — checking "yes" when asked whether he had any criminal history. Immediately, the smiles and first-name familiarity vanished, as did the $35,000-a-year position. Page was left to cobble together a living through part-time contract work."It really hurt," he said. "Yes, I was in prison, but that wasn't all of my experience."
A dignified man whose face sags at the memory of his addiction and subsequent crimes, Page has since rebuilt his life, working in the last four years at a car dealership, communications firm, and civil rights organization. He recently found a new job as a program coordinator with Seattle’s Defender Association — his first full-time job with benefits since the 1990s.
Moving up from the low-income apartment that has been his home since release is Page's next goal. But he stalls, paralyzed by the idea of filling out a rental application.
"You go into a leasing office and tell them, 'Yes, I have some stuff in my background, some robberies.' They take your $35 application fee and then say they can't take you in,” he said. "I don't want the anxiety."
Many believe this is just as it should be: Break the law and you must pay.
Unemployment was not what inmates from the Black Prisoners Caucus planned to discuss when they gathered recently for their weekly meeting at the Monroe Correctional Complex. A community group, the Village of Hope, had brought Page, along with a dozen Seattle officials, to hear from inmates about the ways failure to connect with education had contributed to the trajectory of their lives.
But few were prepared to grapple with the reality looming ahead: the barriers to employment and housing that would surely shape their futures — and those of the other 8,000 other inmates released in Washington each year.
"There's got to be some setup where we can help kids when we get out — not just work at McDonald's or whatever," said 25-year-old Edward Howard, locked up since adolescence for robbery. No, education had not worked for him, Howard said, but there must be a way he could use his life's hard lessons to help someone else.
Around the circle, inmates were nodding in agreement. They, too, wanted to counsel young people. Page broke in: Working with kids was fine, but had anyone considered what it would take just getting on their feet outside the prison walls?
"The barriers to getting a job are not even in the conversation about re-entry," he said, recalling the hard reality of wiping down buses for minimum wage, turning over most of his earnings to a halfway house and, as a result, being unable to save a dime. "At least no one ever talked to me about that."
The inmates fell silent.
For all their good intentions, it is people like Edward Howard — young, idealistic, and unprepared — that most worry Mary Flowers, who cofounded the Village of Hope, in part to keep prison inmates connected with their home communities.
"What's really typical is a 22- or 23-year-old getting released and they probably have not graduated from high school, their maturity has not kicked in, and they have no work experience," she said. "I'm real, real concerned with the younger ones coming out and the bleak reality that they're facing."
The issue of prisoner re-entry has stymied Washington state for years, exploding onto front pages in 2007, after two Seattle police officers and a sheriff’s deputy were killed by felons purportedly under state supervision. Outcry over those deaths resulted in $25 million promised for post-prison transition programs.
Nationally, the time was ripe. As states confronted fiscal recession and drastically shrinking budgets, new research suggested that locking up more people for longer periods was doing nothing to curb crime and — through ever-worsening recidivism rates — might even be costing money in the long run. (In Washington, nearly 40 percent of inmates reoffend and return to prison within five years, each one costing taxpayers $76 per day.)
"The current budget crisis presents states with an important, perhaps unprecedented opportunity," said a report from public safety experts at the Pew Center on the States. "If we had stronger community corrections, we wouldn’t need to lock up so many people at such great cost." They added: "We are well past the point of diminishing returns, where more imprisonment will prevent less and less crime."
Yet Washington state reacted by slashing 256 positions in community corrections, releasing 10,000 felons from oversight and quashing plans for beefed-up programs that would help them transition into society. A patchwork of volunteer efforts and inmate word-of-mouth now constitutes the job-referral system for offenders approaching release, many of whom are freed without substantive preparation for re-joining a society that is vastly different — economically and technologically — from the one they left.
"It surprises me that we don't hold Department of Corrections accountable for recidivism — especially with the $30,000 a year that it costs to lock people up," Page said. "We're not getting any return on that investment. So we've got to decide, when people come out can they only clean buses, clean toilets? We've got to be real about what it costs to live out here."
Patricia Watkins, of the Target Area Development Corporation in Chicago, has spent six years pushing for criminal justice reform in Illinois. Faced with similar difficulties, Illinois — under pressure from community and business groups — has taken a dramatically different approach.
"The more we arrested people, the more they returned to our communities with less resources than they had when they left," said Patricia Watkins, among those leading the prison reform movement as executive director of Chicago's Target Area Development Corp. "They had so many doors shut in their faces that they couldn't re-enter."
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Jul 22, 8:24 a.m. Inappropriate
Great piece. It's past time we took a serious look at this issue in WA state. Prisoners in WA are barred from access to state and federal financial aid so they are only able to take the adult basic education and vocational training classes offered through DOC. You basically can't study for a degree when you're in prison, no matter how motivated you are. Hard to support a family without some post-secondary credential.
One quote in the article bothers me where it says "it surprises me that we don't hold Department of Corrections accountable for recidivism." That's not really true. DOC reports this information as part of the Governor's GMAP accountability initiative. See http://performance.wa.gov/FinalPublicSafety/PS061510/CommunityCorrections/Trendofreoffensesbyo/Pages/default.aspx
Posted Thu, Jul 22, 2:59 p.m. Inappropriate
Leave the country and re-enter illegally. Re-create an ID from scratch. Then claim financial aid.
Posted Thu, Jul 22, 3:27 p.m. Inappropriate
At least they can still vote!
http://www.westernjournalism.com/felons-voting-illegally-may-have-put-franken-over-the-top-in-minnesota-study-finds/
Posted Thu, Jul 22, 8:08 p.m. Inappropriate
Seems really simple to me. Don't do crimes that will send you to prison!
Of course we could always use the liberal solution of sending them bigger welfare checks. That solves everything.
Posted Thu, Jul 22, 8:54 p.m. Inappropriate
An excellent article, touching on one of our "Third Rail" issues: Crime, corrections, and rehabilitation.
Despite the sophomoric comments by such as "kilgoretrout" (who affects a Vonnegut persona, but lacks the requisite intelligence--so it goes) or "Reklessone" (for whom human dilemmas can be packed away in the dark, like tuna in a can), this is a problem of astonishing proportions. It means that we are less productive, that we lose the potential value of the "corrected" person's contribution, and that we daily contribute to the creation and maintenance of a permanent underclass.
America the Beautiful is also America the Incarcerator (way beyond any other country in the world, not excepting Russia, China, or Cuba), and also America the Unforgiving (the completion of a judicially-mandated sentence, far from "serving one's debt to society," is really only the beginning of a life-long devaluation of self, social standing, and earning power, no matter how profound the individual's commitment to rehabilitation).
Evidently, people like Reklessone know not a single individual--brother, brother-in-law, friend, well-regarded acquaintance, or extended family member--who has ever been arrested, let alone charged and either entered into a plea bargain or been adjudged guilty of a misdemeanor or more serious crime. Knows no one who has a "record," no matter how minor the infraction or how victimless or trivial the crime.
Being so uncontaminated by personal acquaintance, Reklessone is free to spit on even the most innocuous miscreant--lumping all those who have, however temporarily, been on "the wrong side of the law" into a single bloc of disenfranchised and devalued persons. Reklessone has never known an adolescent or young wo/man who, because of foolishness or unforgiveable blackness or hispanicness or uneducated whiteness, screwed up (or been framed up) and spent time in a corrections facility. Reklessone has never confronted the possibility that such a person could, in the course of his/her development (and perhaps even while confined or on parole or otherwise supervised) be fully and completely rehabilitated--such that s/he was fully deserving of a new, fresh, unmarked start in life.
Reklessone has never considered that "corrections" means "correction," not "everlasting punishment". Reklessone has never considered that, of the tens of thousands of young men and women who traverse a system that is far more likely to damage than to aid, many are worthy, and will have earned, the right to reentry into society.
Reklessone doesn't wish to rehabilitate, to forgive, and certainly not to reintegrate, and in this respect, s/he is probably, and tragically, typical of the average American. That average American refuses to look at the way in which we have criminalized an astonishing array of behavior and sent such an astoundingly high percentage of our youth to correctional facilities of one sort or another. Nor how we continue to throw away their potential contribution as citizens by oppressing and punishing them long, long after they emerge from the dreadful institutions in which we lock them up.
Posted Fri, Jul 23, 8:29 a.m. Inappropriate
It seems to me that one of the more obvious problems here is that recidivism rates will be much higher if ex-prisoners are unable to find employment. So, this system may very well be detrimental to public safety. The Target Area program looks like an intriguing idea, and I have high hopes that budget constraints, if nothing else, will lead to some better approaches to criminal justice issues.
Posted Fri, Jul 23, 5:05 p.m. Inappropriate
SENECA, I can't help but respond to you. I tend to get offended by pseudo-intellectual liberals. Before retiring, I was a Technical Publications Engineer for a major avionics company. I have a genius IQ. You might be surprised to know I managed to get through life without trying to impress people with big words.
I'm proud to be an average American. You said "he is probably, and tragically, typical of the average American". How sad that you think you are better than the average American and we need your help in managing our live. Seneca, you are a pompous jerk!!! I suggest you and your Socialist ideas may be happier in another country. Cuba is a nice Socialist country. Maybe they would benefit from your aristocratic ideals.
I believe in God, guns, family and the Constitution.
Posted Fri, Jul 23, 5:40 p.m. Inappropriate
this is an awfully long, meandering and fluffy piece for what's really a simple solution: be a good citizen and don't break the law. yes, the u.s. has an incarceration problem. agreed. but how about writing a long, puffy piece about investing into communities to prevent criminal behavior before incarceration occurs?
i'm more sympathetic to the "pre-offender" than the offender who can't get a job after committing a felony. that's part of the price of doing the crime in America, like it or not. and enabling journalism that points a finger back at society for not helping prisoners land work -- especially in one of the worst recessions in modern times when people with clean records are unemployed -- doesn't do much for me, really. maybe i would have like this story better when the economy was humming along. but it seems like bad timing, at best, in these times.
Posted Fri, Jul 23, 6:40 p.m. Inappropriate
Wow, at least I would force a prisoner to read a pompous Seneca post, that would be an eighth amendment violation against cruel and unusual punishment.
But, as they say, no one hates like a liberal.
Posted Fri, Jul 23, 6:41 p.m. Inappropriate
Wow, at least I would not force a prisoner to read a pompous Seneca post, that would be an eighth amendment violation against cruel and unusual punishment.
But, as they say, no one hates like a liberal.
Posted Mon, Jul 26, 12:47 p.m. Inappropriate
Speaking of the United States' incarceration problem, the latest Economist cover story is worth reading.
http://www.economist.com/node/16636027?story_id=16636027
Posted Mon, Jul 26, 4:37 p.m. Inappropriate
In America today the sad truth is that we are all not much better than a "former felon" in the job market of today.
Curious too how the corporate plantation owners went bankrupt in 2008, yet it is the working poor, one step up from the subject of this article, who paid the cost.
And now find themselves living with much the same prospects as a "former felon".
Posted Tue, Jul 27, 3:41 p.m. Inappropriate
Reklessone -
You believe in God huh? It doesn't sound like it. I'd say Jesus would fall right into the Socialist category that you so dislike. I've often wondered if Jesus really were alive today, trying to help felons, homeless and downtrodden people. He'd probably be killed or run out of the country by people just like you.
If for no other reason, I would think the 'tough on crime' crowd here would want felons to have jobs if for no other reason than for their own personal safety. After all, if a felon doesn't have a job, guess what? They're going to get money by stealing cars, mugging people and breaking into homes and businesses. I agree totally with pepper2000 on this.
Posted Wed, Jul 28, 9:56 p.m. Inappropriate
Seneca - victims of violent crime, like the Tuba Man, have had their lives "packed away in a tuna can." I have no sympathy for those who have violently attacked innocent people. I favor safe streets, 24 hours a day, and for those who violate that, lock them away for life. Let's emphasize safety for the law abiding majority.
Posted Sat, Jul 31, 9:26 p.m. Inappropriate
There has got to be a better way. Violent people shouldn't get out of prison.
Perhaps it should be illegal for employers to ask these questions, unless the job involves personal visits to people's homes, working with children, or handling money.
Posted Sat, Jul 31, 9:31 p.m. Inappropriate
Prisoners should be required to study for a GED, then further career training while in prison, and the government should pay for it, which means taxpayers paying for it. Continuing incarceration of ignorant, poorly trained people, then releasing them into the streets is a waste of taxpayers money.
Do the time, learn a trade.