CLARENCE PAGE: I want to say a couple of words about
our topic, "From Recidivism to Redemption: Ending the
Cycle of Incarceration." This week is the twentieth
anniversary of the death of Len Bias, the University of
Maryland basketball player who died of a cocaine overdose,
ending what promised to be a stunning career. His death
sparked the new phase of the drug wars we have seen since
the 1960s. I bring this up because it is indicative of the
explosion of prison populations over the last few decades
and the inevitability of people reentering society from
prison. This has a particularly brutal impact on the African-American
community, and raises questions about how we can reintroduce—or
in many cases introduce—folks to a mainstream life.
We have a group of distinguished experts here today who
I hope can offer some insight into this. I am going to ask
each of our panelists to give a brief overview from their
own perspective on this topic and then have a broader discussion
with me.
We will begin with Jeremy Travis from the John Jay College
of Criminal Justice.
JEREMY TRAVIS: I am very pleased to be part of this
timely and important conference. I have done a fair amount
of work over the past five years on the issue of incarceration
and re-entry, so I will limit myself to three points. The
first is the question of scale, the second is to talk about
the issue of recidivism, and the third is to talk about
the phenomenon of reintegration. I call these the "three
R's:" re-entry, recidivism and reintegration. I will
leave it to Reverend Goode to discuss the question of redemption.
The scale of imprisonment is important for us to keep in
mind when we talk about the status of Black men in our society.
Over the past 30 years, we have more than quadrupled the
per capita rate of incarceration in this country. Some have
termed this a grand social experiment in which we set out-not
quite intentionally, but it was no accident either-to increase
dramatically the use of imprisonment as our response to
crime. We now have the dubious distinction of having the
highest rate of incarceration in the world. The consequence
of having roughly 1.4 million people in prison and another
600,000 or 700,000 people in jail is what I have termed
the "iron law of imprisonment," which is that
they all come back to prison. But They All Come Back:
Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry is also the
title of a book I wrote on this topic. We need to think
about prisons not as static institutions, but rather as
institutions that churn large numbers of individuals, mostly
men, in and out of a small number of communities—mostly
communities of color—in our society. As policy analysts,
we must think about the consequences of this phenomenon.
Consider a few statistics: we have about 650,000 people
coming out of our state and federal prisons each year now,
which is about 1,800 a day. That is four times as many as
made similar journeys 20 years ago. This has to be part
of any conversation on the state of Black men in our society
due to the sheer size of this population.
The geographic concentration of this national phenomenon
is also very important for our understanding. These men—I
will use "men" because 90 percent of the individuals
coming out of prison are men—are coming from a small
number of communities, which has profound effects on those
communities.
Let me just give two ways of thinking about it; one is
to talk about the consequences of the removal of large numbers
of men from society on the relationships between boys and
girls. Donald Braman, an anthropologist from Yale, has done
some wonderful work. He coined the phrase "gender imbalance"
in this sense to describe the differences in communities
with high levels of incarceration in the growing up experiences
of boys and girls. Anything else that we discuss relating
to cultural and individual lifestyle issues-education, for
example-has to take into account the fact that we have a
gender imbalance. In the communities where Braman did his
work in Washington, D.C. the highest rate of imbalance was
about 62 men per 100 women in communities of high concentration
of incarceration.
The second way to think about this is to look at this as
a phenomenon of a right of passage at the community level.
Todd Clear, my colleague at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice, has documented that in East New York, on a yearly
basis 1 in 8 parenting-aged males on the high concentration
blocks is arrested and sent to jail or prison. That yearly
number aggregates over time, so a very high percentage of
the men in the communities of concern here experience incarceration
at some point in their life. On a national level, an African-American
man today has a 30 percent lifetime chance of serving at
least one year in prison. I would like to be optimistic
about the likelihood of reversing this reality and returning
to the status quo of 1972, but I think the chances of even
getting close to that are slim. I think we have to recognize
that we now live-regrettably, in my view-in an era of mass
incarceration.
My second point is about recidivism. How do we think about
this new phenomenon of high rates of incarceration affecting
a small number of communities using the standard criminal
justice metric of recidivism, or re-arrest for criminal
behavior in the future? There are two Bureau of Justice
Statistics studies that look at recidivism, one from the
eighties and one from the nineties, and both have found
that roughly two-thirds of people released from prisons
are arrested for one or more serious crimes within three
years of their release. This is not a good track record
in terms of accountability and bottom line outcomes, and
there is no indication that it has changed. One might hypothesize
that a study conducted in the nineties, when we saw steep
declines in rates of violence in our urban areas, may have
seen a corresponding decline in the misconduct of those
coming out of prison, but we did not see that. In fact,
we saw a slight increase from the eighties.
This recidivism phenomenon takes on particular importance
if you look at it from a public safety point of view. Our
rates of crime and arrest are so much lower today, and the
re-entry cohort is so much larger, but it is recidivating
at about the same rate as before, so the group coming out
of prison now constitutes a much larger share of our crime
problem than ever before in the nation's history. This means
that those who are interested in public safety need to especially
focus on this population. It is an identifiable population,
and we have legal control over them to some extent for a
period after their release, and although they are not more
dangerous than before, they are contributing more than ever
to our nation's crime issue. In particular, we need to focus
on the mechanisms of supervision. As the number of people
coming out of prison has increased fourfold, the number
of people we send back to prison for parole violations has
increased sevenfold. Approximately two-thirds of these parole
violations are technical violations—they fail to observe
a curfew, fail a drug test, fail to keep a job—and
we now have 200,000 people going back to prison for parole
violations every year, which is the same number of people
we sent to prison for any reason in 1980. We have created
this system of back-end sentencing in which we churn people
in and out of our prisons, and the mechanisms of supervision
tend to be a very effective way of sending them back to
prison without much accountability for their results, but
at great public expense.
My third point has to do with reintegration. The ultimate
goal-which is both a justice goal and a social goal-is desistance
from crime. Stated positively, the ultimate goal is to help
people reconnect to the positive influences of family, work
and civil society. There are several programs that do this
well, but the larger question is not a programmatic question,
rather it is a policy question of how to respond to the
reality of large numbers of men of color coming in and out
of the prison system. In my book, But They All Come Back,
I make a few policy suggestions, such as creating re-entry
courts. I like the idea of justice intermediaries, which
is a way of thinking about somebody at the community level
other than a parole officer managing the reintegration process.
I am associated with a project in Chicago—mounted by
The Safer Foundation and funded by the John D. and Catherine
T. McArthur Foundation—that is about to test the idea
of a justice intermediary, borrowing from the welfare reform
experiments with employment intermediaries and housing intermediaries.
This is an urgent policy debate, and we are now at the point
where we know there is a big problem and our current remedy
is not working. The Urban Institute study that I recommend
to you shows that parole supervision does not reduce recidivism
rates, so our common policy response of parole—supervision,
drug tests, assistance getting jobs—is not working.
We are still at the same stage as we were when the Kansas
City Preventive Patrol research came out showing that the
basic police methodology was not working, and it is going
to take us 30 years to figure out what to do next.
I think there are some instructive analogies to welfare
reform that apply here. One is to devolve responsibility
to the lowest level possible in government, which in my
mind is at the community level with justice intermediaries.
Secondly, we should engage community. We need to place a
premium on work, and I argue for full employment prisons
as the way to start that idea. There is a lot of idleness
and work for the state in prisons now, but we need to get
the private sector involved in prisons. We need to give
prisoners the idea of working or doing something productive
to improve their human capital while in prison, not as a
coerced requirement, but as a strategy for moving toward
productive reengagement on the outside. These conversations
must include an inside/outside partnership. We have to remember
that people spend, on average, less than three years in
prison nationally, and we need to consider where they go
and what they do when they come out of prison. We need to
think about drug treatment in connection to mental health
and overall health, as well as communicable diseases, workforce
development, and family reunification; all of these dimensions
of re-entry require partnerships. My personal recommendation
is to have full employment prisons established prior to
re-entry and to get very close to requiring some sort of
work as a condition of release, organized along the idea
of helping to make communities stronger again. We should
require productive and redemptive work in connection to
private sector jobs wherever possible.
CHAUNCEY PARKER: My job for New York State is to
oversee the criminal justice system, which includes the
prisons, parole and state police, among other things. What
is our philosophy in state criminal justice? What have we
done so far relating to offender re-entry? What is our plan
for the future?
Our philosophy is very simple: the most important thing
that we do in government is protect people, so everything
that we do in the arena of criminal justice needs to be
geared toward that particular goal. If you are going to
have a goal, then it needs to be specific about what it
will accomplish, it has to be measurable, and it has to
be transparent. If we look at our goal in criminal justice
as protecting people, the chief way that we can measure
our success is through crime rates. This means that we should
be looking at everything we do-prevention, drug treatment,
enforcement, or anything on the spectrum-to see if it effectively
reduces crime. We have to get out of the business of measuring
our success or failure by the number of kilos of cocaine
we seize or the number of people we arrest. That may be
helpful and interesting, but does it reduce crime? Over
the last 12 years, New York State has seen an extraordinary
reduction in crime statewide, which New York City led with
its historic and world-renowned crime reduction, while the
rest of the state has had a 30 percent reduction.
New York State has also been able to reduce its prison
population from 72,000 inmates to 63,000 inmates in the
last six years. In addition, our parole return rate has
gone down about 40 percent for people coming back to state
prison over the last 12 years. To summarize, crime has gone
down, the prison population has gone down, and at the same
time, the return rate for parolees coming back on a new
crime has gone down.
What are some of the strategies we have used to achieve
these successes? We have tried to be smarter about what
we do. Some of the plans have given people in prison an
incentive to participate in programs that we think will
improve the hand-off back to the community. The offender
re-entry hand-off that I am thinking of is almost like a
baton in a relay race, in which the baton is handed from
one runner to the other and it never drops: If we really
do it right, people should be able to leave prison and go
on to live a law-abiding life within the community. One
of our programs has been for people who are in prison for
a nonviolent offense; if they participate in vocational
or drug treatment programs, successfully complete them,
and do not get involved in any kind of violence in prison,
then they can get one-sixth of their prison sentence reduced.
Over the last 12 years, 50,000 people have gotten out early
as a result of that particular program. Those types of programs
are smarter criminal justice.
I think we are only taking the first step in a thousand
mile journey, in terms of what we need to do. If we are
going to be smarter in criminal justice, we need to be smarter
when it comes to prison re-entry, because roughly a third
of the 63,000 people in prison leave every year. If we were
real crime fighters, we would see to it that as few of those
people come back to prison as possible. One of the key initiatives
that we have just started—which I think is the future
of prisoner reentry—is a local hand-off. Local social
service providers and criminal justice professionals need
to know ahead of time and prepare for that baton hand-off
long before someone steps out of prison so that we are as
successful as possible, having very few of the 26,000 people
who come out of prison go back to prison. For this pilot
project we picked eight counties—including Buffalo,
Rochester and Nassau County—and we will give the counties
funding to hire a full-time person as a re-entry coordinator
who will bring together people from labor, health, mental
health and criminal justice sectors, who all have an interest
in former prisoners going on to live law-abiding lives.
The coordinator also puts together a full-time re-entry
taskforce, so that in Rochester, for example, they will
known exactly when and how many prisoners will be coming
back to the city of Rochester, how many have or need a job,
and that some of them will need drug treatment. The task
force will also know which people are the highest-risk and
lowest risk offenders. We will know whether or not we are
effective by bottom line measures—crime and recidivism
rates—not by anecdotes or because this all sounds good.
I will give you my final observation. As part of my job,
I go through all the prisons in New York, and what has struck
me is the one common denominator of every prison I have
been through: on so many prisoners' pillows is a picture
of a little girl or boy, or a wife, or somebody in the family.
There is nothing inevitable about returning to prison if
we can make the transition and bring people back to their
families; the impact of somebody who goes back to being
a father or a husband or back to being employed and law
abiding is powerful. If we can make that transition, it
would be the smartest thing we can do in law enforcement.
We are nowhere near where we need to be, but I think we
are smart enough to know that if we are going to be effective
this must be the centerpiece of what we do.
VICKI LOPEZ LUKIS: I am happy to be here to share
with you some of the great policy work that is happening
in Florida. As an ex-offender myself, I think I can speak
to the redemption side personally, and I think what Governor
Jeb Bush is doing in Florida connects the dots. One of the
things that Governor Bush did—thanks to support from
the Annie E. Casey Foundation—is create a taskforce
with ex-offenders, business leaders, law enforcement agencies
and some of his executive agency heads to identify the barriers
to re-entry into society. Florida has the third largest
prison population in the country, and unlike New York, it
is growing every day. We have over 87,000 inmates in Florida's
state prisons, not including the largest federal prison
complex in Coleman, Florida, or the thousands of county
jails in our communities. We have 128 correctional facilities
in Florida, and now that we have 30,000 people returning
home to our communities there is a problem that we can no
longer ignore. I think that to Governor Bush's credit, his
legacy will be leaving some solutions that will really decrease
the number of people who go to prison and who re-enter prison.
I am here to talk a little bit about the barriers that we
have found.
One of the first barriers we explored was the fact that
prisoners were actually leaving prison with their prison
tag, and that was the only form of identification they had.
This was problematic because in order to get a job, fill
out a housing application, or cash the $100 check that we
give them, they need a government-issued ID; post 9/11,
a prison tag is not considered a government-issued ID. We
sent a recommendation about this to the Governor in our
first report, suggesting that prisoners leave prison with
some form of identification, whether that is a driver's
license, a Florida ID, or their birth certificate. Many
of them do not have one, so they also need to leave with
a social security card. It is impossible to do anything
without those documents, so we are addressing this as a
public policy issue.
In addition, many of our prisoners suffer from medical
disabilities, so we want them to leave with their benefits
securely in place, which means that the Department of Corrections
has to facilitate those benefits applications. If an inmate
had SSDI or SSI when they went into prison, we would like
them to be able to get those benefits again upon leaving.
Working with the benefits system is a very long process,
and we are trying to lessen the gap in services. Forty six
percent of our prison population has a mental illness, so
many of them will receive 30 days worth of medication upon
their release, but when that medication runs out, it is
likely that these individuals will experience a serious
meltdown in our communities. Therefore, our second recommendation
to the Governor is that we enable former inmates to maintain
their mental health medications through Medicaid or social
security benefits.
The third recommendation was that we remove all employment
disqualifications where appropriate and necessary. As the
state, we want to take a leadership role, and we cannot
ask the business community to employ our ex-offenders if
we will not employ them ourselves. The Governor actually
issued an Executive Order—the first of its kind in
the country—directing his executive agencies and their
contractors to give their employment disqualifications for
ex-offenders a hard look. He gave them 90 days to review
their policies and propose changes or waiver procedures.
I think that the Governor's Executive Order really sends
a strong message to his executive agencies that we expect
to be able to employ ex-offenders and give them a second
chance.
Child support is another important issue. Many of our ex-offenders
have child support obligations, and they often do not understand
that they can modify their agreements when they go to prison,
so what ends up happening is that they begin to accumulate
arrearages while they are incarcerated. We want the Department
of Corrections to help identify those that have child support
obligations when they come into prison and to assist them
in modifying their reports. It is critically important that
child support is paid when it can be paid, and to appropriate
levels, so that people do not exit prison with almost impossible
arrearages, which pose a great disincentive to employment.
We also believe that there has to be a review of the zero
tolerance policies. Zero tolerance means, for example, that
a failed urine test will send a parolee back to prison to
serve his remaining sentence. In another example, an ex-offender
who went across the street to have dinner at a neighbor's
house, not knowing that the middle of his street was the
county line, would be in violation of his parole and sent
back to prison. Such policies are contrary to successful
reentry, and we want the Governor to look at them and consider
whether we need to determine whether probation or parole
violations are malicious or unintended.
Lastly, we thought about coaching and support. Florida
has three faith-based, character-based institutions that
have some extraordinary mentoring programs, which we believe
to be deserving of expansion. The taskforce has embarked
on the Community Partnership Initiative, which will hopefully
bring the justice intermediary and the community together
to give ex-offenders the best possible chances for a successful
re-entry into society. I appreciate being able to share
Governor Bush's vision here today, and I hope that we will
be able to talk more about it in the future.
COMMISSIONER MARTIN F. HORN: As I sit here and think
about it, it occurs to me that I may well be among the top
five employers of African-Americans and African-American
men in the city of New York. In the New York City Departments
of Correction and Probation we employ close to 12,000 people,
and upwards of 75 percent of my employees are African-American.
What is interesting is that today 40 percent of the correction
officers in New York City are women, and within three years
we expect that more than 50 percent of the correction officers
in New York City will be women. We have a minimum entry
requirement of 60 college credits, which at the time it
was implemented was hailed as an innovative way of improving
the quality of our workforce, but I now believe that it
may have a disparate impact on our ability to hire African-American
men. It is something that we are re-evaluating now.
The problem of that educational disparity is very real
and has interesting consequences, because the civil service
is very much and always has been an entry point into the
middle class. These are good family-sustaining jobs, so
it is puzzling to me that we are having so much difficulty
attracting men to these positions.
I cannot add to what Jeremy Travis and Vicki Lopez Lukis
have said about this country's addiction to imprisonment,
but I believe that the criminal justice system is a blunt
instrument and it is a mistake to rely on it to fix the
problem, so I disagree with what Larry Mead has proposed.1
I do not see the criminal justice system being very effective
as an instrument for social or cultural change, and I think
that if we rely on it to address these problems the only
thing that will result is more incarceration.
I have several observations that I would like to share
with you as a result of my experience working in the criminal
justice system. I have done direct work and had a lot of
contact with many African-American men in prisons and jails
in New York State, New York City, and Pennsylvania. My first
observation is that we need to intervene earlier. I think
that we over-incarcerate juveniles. In New York State, we
rely extensively on out-of-home placement for juvenile delinquency.
In New York City, we send about 1,300 juveniles a year to
congregate foster care agencies outside of the city, some
run by the state, some run by private organizations, at
an enormous cost of about $150,000 a year. Imagine what
you could do with $150,000 a year. Fifty percent of these
boys are re-arrested within six months, and 81 percent of
all of these children are re-arrested within three years.
We are creating a culture of imprisonment; we are turbo-charging
whatever is going wrong in those young people's lives. For
one thing, we are interrupting their educational progress,
and in many cases, they are not receiving credit for the
education that they received in detention upon returning
to the city schools, particularly in some of the private
schools. It seems to me that we are creating a group of
young men with anger and retarded educational potential,
and we are perpetuating the pernicious alienation from the
mainstream that Abigail Thernstrom has described.2
When I think about the large number of men who are supposedly
not working, I see something quite different in my role
as Probation Commissioner: they are all working—they
all have money in their pockets, they all have the carfare
to come see their probation officers, and they are not on
welfare. These men are working, but they are working in
the underground economies that exist in the very communities
that Jeremy Travis discussed. So I do not believe that this
is a matter of a lack of self-discipline, rather I think
it is the inability of our economy to compete with the existing
underground economy.
I think part of the problem, as I perceive it, is that
the jobs in our economy are service jobs that do not pay
sufficiently and are actually more attractive to women,
except for being deliverymen. The jobs that our economy
has created are not jobs that the young men that I speak
to on probation or in our jails are interested in, nor can
they compete with the glamour or the tax-free money that
comes with no-questions-asked jobs. In this respect, I would
point a finger at the media, which glamorizes a gangster
culture over a conventional lifestyle.
Let me tell you a little bit about the inmates we have
in our city's jails. We do not run not the largest jail
system in the country—that distinction belongs to Los
Angeles, and I am afraid that soon Chicago and Philadelphia
may well overtake New York City too—but of our 14,000
inmates, 70 to 80 percent have some form of addiction history.
I do not think that you can talk about the ability to help
people find work if you do not deal with their addiction;
if they cannot stay sober, they will fail. Years ago when
I complained about the people on parole who we were referring
to the Neighborhood Work Project not getting jobs, one of
Mindy Tarlow's predecessors said to me, "you're sending
them to me and they're high. Of course I can't get them
work, and of course they're not going to keep their jobs.
If you can't keep them sober, I can't keep them employed."
We have to deal with the issue of drug addiction and sobriety:
20 percent of our inmates require detoxification upon admission;
32 percent of them are illiterate at the time of admission;
40 percent of them require some form of mental health services;
and 29 percent are what New York State calls SPMI —seriously
and persistently mentally ill. Thirty percent of those leaving
jail end up in homeless shelters.
I would suggest to you that if we were serious about breaking
the cycle of crime and jail and unemployment, and about
helping these young men return to what we call the conventional
mainstream—and I would argue that in their communities
they are in the mainstream, they are just not in our mainstream—we
would concentrate on education while they are in prison.
How can we let people leave our prisons without being able
to read and write? If we were serious about breaking that
cycle, we would be looking at education inside our prisons
and we would be talking about sobriety.
When Mayor Bloomberg's transition team first interviewed
me, Edison Jackson, the President of Medgar Evers College,
looked me in the eye and said, "I'm told that it's
easier to get drugs on Rikers Island than it is in the community."
In 1995, when Governor Tom Ridge interviewed me to become
Secretary of Corrections in Pennsylvania, he asked me how
inmates could be leaving prison high. I thought that could
not be the case, but in fact, it is. Drug use is happening
in every jail and prison in the United States, and we must
be committed to the notion that jails and prisons be drug
free places where we enforce abstinence and teach sobriety.
There has to be a way of keeping people abstinent while
they are in prison and teaching them how to stay sober,
because they have to leave prisons and jails work-ready.
Finally, if we were serious about changing the cycle, we
would ask the question of government, how much do you invest
in seeing to it that upon release from prison or jail every
offender goes someplace other than a homeless shelter? How
much money do you invest in helping them to find a job?
We do about 110,000 admissions in our jails, and 25 percent
of them are for three days or less; these men are trying
be conventional, and a few days in jail interrupts that.
Their progress is not going to proceed in a straight line—they
are going to have some slips and falls—and we have
to understand that with respect to their sobriety and education.
W. WILSON GOODE, SR.: I am going to make one point:
the best re-entry program is no entry. We need to look at
prevention. We know a lot about those who are likely to
end up in prison. We know that single parent homes, low
achievement in school, environmental conditions, and the
absence of positive role models are contributing factors
to a child ending up in prison. We also know that on any
given day in America there are 7.3 million children with
a parent in jail or under some type of state or federal
supervision. We also know that if we do nothing about that
problem, 70 percent of those children will end up in prison
themselves.
I went to a prison outside of Philadelphia and saw in that
prison a grandfather, a father, and a grandson, and as I
was about to leave, the grandson told me, "I have a
son that I've not seen and I guess I will see him for the
first time in prison too." There is a generational
cycle of incarceration.
The addiction to incarceration feeds on itself, and in
the last 30 years, there has been a 757 percent increase
in incarceration of women, and a 257 percent increase in
incarceration of men. Crime has remained about stable in
that timeframe. So if you have 70 percent of 7.3 million,
about 5 million children in this country are at risk of
going to jail themselves. We also know that a relationship
between a loving, caring adult and a child can help reverse
these trends. We know that when a parent is separated from
a child by virtue of incarceration four basic things happen
to the child: a deficiency in academic achievements, truancy
from school, misbehavior in school, and a lack of trust
in others. We have also learned that when there is a loving,
caring adult in the life of a child for at least one hour
at least once a week for at least one year, some positive
outcomes occur in that child's life.
Assessments show that two-thirds of those who had been
in a mentoring relationship for one year ended up getting
better grades, attending school more regularly, and not
misbehaving in school. After six months, 90 percent of them
said they trusted others more. Therefore, I believe that
there is something here that can begin to reverse this trend.
The model of the Amachi Program—a program that partners
a secular institution with faith-based institutions to find
mentors for children with a parent in jail—has influenced
some 30,000 relationships across this country, and I believe
can lead to the reduction in the prison population in this
country.
I recommend that every state in America put aside at least
one-half of one percent of its corrections budget and use
it toward mentoring children of prisoners, and another one-half
of one percent to use for re-entry programs. If we were
to do this, I think that we could begin to solve this problem.
How would I use the money? I would use the money for re-entry
to begin removing the employment barriers that exist for
those who are coming out of jail. Public/Private Ventures
has done very nice work in this area, which shows that people
who get a mentor as they come out of jail—preferably
one from a faith-based institution—who walk them through
the reentry process and help them reintegrate into their
home and family and find a job, can really turn things around.
I think this is very promising.
MR. PAGE: I want to do a couple of quick follow-up
questions here before we go to audience questions. Jeremy
Travis, I remember you mentioned that in some states judges
are working with ex-offenders in a post re-entry court.
I was wondering how you feel about that as an example of
court-mandated parole.
MR. TRAVIS: I am a big fan of drug courts and we
now have a ten-year history of looking at them. A report
just came out from the Justice Department that shows them
to be effective at reducing recidivism and cost effective.
I like the idea of re-entry courts and have proposed this
model as a way to make the entire supervision process more
transparent, and to provide both carrots and sticks to people
coming out of prison, which has been an effective strategy
in drug courts. The re-entry court idea is a jurisdictional
shift between the executive branch and the judicial branch,
but it is also a shift in managing the re-entry process;
it changes the process from one that is administrative in
nature, with some social work and surveillance, into a more
open forum with a direct relationship between judges on
the one hand and the individual who is leaving prison and
his family and support system on the other.
MR. PAGE: Chauncey Parker, how do you feel about
that, and also in regard to the low literacy rates that
Dr. Horn mentioned?
MR. PARKER: If we know that people who are working
under the supervision of parole have a lower recidivism
rate than people who are not working, common sense would
tell us to have as many job opportunities, and as many men
working as possible. Therefore, we look at the employment
rate, but we also know that in order to get a job you need
a birth certificate, a social security number, and a GED.
These are common sense steps that we need to take.
MR. PAGE: Vicki Lopez: I would like to get your
thoughts on this gender gap. I asked my son why he and the
other guys in class keep getting in trouble in school, and
how come I never hear about any trouble from the girls in
class, and he told me that paying attention is for girls.
Commissioner Horn mentioned how our modern post-industrial
America is producing jobs that are not that appealing to
men. What have you run across in Florida?
MS. LOPEZ LUKIS: I think it has been the reverse
in Florida, interestingly enough. I am working with community-service
providers who are finding it more difficult to place women
in jobs, but that is because in Florida construction is
the leading industry for jobs and many of the men in prison
have some skill related to that. Most often, the women leaving
prison do not have any skills at all. In fact, I just interviewed
100 women who are leaving our maximum-security facility
in Broward County in the next four months and asked them,
"what can you do?" They said things like, "I
don't know, I've never worked," and that they do not
know how to work a computer, and many of them just broke
into tears. As a side note, conditions of confinement truly
are indicators of how you will leave prison, and Florida
has not done a very good job of improving confinement conditions,
which are related to emotional well-being, especially for
women.
QUESTION: I wonder if you can comment on the success
of faith-based programs versus non-faith-based programs,
and how do you deal with the issue of the prison population
being a recruitment grounds for terrorists among the faith-based
programs? I know that everybody has faith-based programs
and that is a below the surface concern when you introduce
religion into the prisons.
MR. GOODE: In my view, that is the wrong question;
we spend so much time trying to compare programs, but the
fact of the matter is that we have enough problems for everyone
to be involved, so we need non-faith based and faith-based
folks working to solve these problems. Is there a difference?
What I know is there are about 3,000 congregations across
this country who are engaged in helping children who were
not engaged five years ago, and that means there are a lot
of people involved in trying to help solve these problems.
If we focus on getting people to involve themselves in a
positive way to help someone else grow and become all they
can become, I think we are able to use both faith-based
and non-faith-based people in that process.
QUESTION: My question is for Commissioner Horn:
What kind of outreach are you doing to grassroots organizations,
because I think that there should be some monies allocated
to grassroots organizations that are in the community to
work with the people coming back into the community.
COMMISSIONER HORN: All of the work that we are doing
in New York City for re-entry programs we are doing through
community-based organizations. As Jeremy Travis said, there
are specific communities that most of the individuals coming
to our jails and prisons are coming to us from, and unfortunately,
many of the not-for-profit, social service, community-based
organizations are not physically located in or directly
connected to those communities. The New York City Council
two years ago put about 14 million dollars toward promoting
connections between some of the more established community-based
organizations and grassroots organizations in individual
communities. In New York City we are spending over 10 million
dollars on re-entry, most of which is going to private,
not-for-profit organizations, but there is still a long
way to go.
QUESTION: This conversation has hardly mentioned
the police, and I am curious what you think the police could
do as part of this agenda. Leaving them out seems to make
no sense to me. Secondly, I would like to comment on sending
people back to jail for minor or technical parole violations,
as someone mentioned earlier. Police are under great pressure
to reduce crime. For example, Operation Cease Fire in Boston
explicitly took advantage of the vulnerability of people
on probation, in that if they were doing something else
that the police could not convict them for, the police could
instead bring them back into custody on a parole violation.
It seems to me that there may be an underside to that story
that we are missing here.
MR. TRAVIS: The police have been a missing voice
in the re-entry conversation for reasons that are historical
and cultural in terms of how police think about their relationship
to the backend of the criminal justice system. However,
they are an important potential player, both from a public
safety point of view and, I would argue, from a reintegration
perspective. From a public safety point of view, this is
a crime reduction opportunity, but the police do not think
of it that way. A partnership here would start between police
and corrections, and the basic argument would be to charge
that partnership with the task of reducing failure rates
in the first months after someone gets out of prison so
that every person coming out of prison has a safety plan.
Right now, neither corrections, nor parole, nor the police
think about this as an accountability question. The first
task is to go where the risk is, and the risk is highest
right after people get out of prison. If we put resources
where the risk is, we would think very differently about
re-entry management, and we would look at the risk factors
associated with that period of time when people leave incarceration
and go back to the chaotic world of the streets.
The police also have a role in a re-integrative sense.
One of the programs that I like the most around the country
is in Baltimore, called the Re-entry Partnership, where
the community group comes to the table to meet with everybody
coming out of prison and going back to their community within
the next 30 days, and talks about success, risks, and failure.
The beat officer for that community attends, and the message
he and the parole officer send to the people coming out
of prison is that they want them to succeed. That is a very
important message to come from the police; that makes them
not only the enforcers, but also part of the reintegration.
As to the second question, we have to be very careful in
extrapolating from things like the Boston success to a general
policy proposition that we should use supervision and legal
leverage to say that no matter what the violation, the consequence
is going back to prison. That approach misuses an expensive
resource, it fails to get the desired behavioral change,
and it is not tied to the realities of re-entry. Those people
also come back, and they usually come back quickly, and
we have no data that shows that there is a public safety
benefit to putting someone away for a parole violation when
they come back within a matter of months or years. We do
not have to use this hammer to the fullest extent just because
we have it.
ED DANIELS: I work with ex-offenders, veterans,
and their families out of the Harlem Veterans Center. My
first question is for Commissioner Horn. I sit on the advisory
board for one of the largest shelters here in New York City
called the Borden Avenue Veteran's Residence in Long Island
City. We have 400 people there, and a large number of ex-offenders,
and it is very difficult to find housing for them because
of their circumstances, so do you have a specific idea or
suggestion as to how we could help them find houses? As
you said, many of them come out of prison ill-educated and
not skilled enough to make enough money to support their
housing on a private level. My second question is to Mr.
Travis: When you talk about full-employment prisons, what
do you mean? How would that work?
MR. HORN: It is very clear that individuals who
come out of shelters have a much higher likelihood of failure.
Indeed, 30 percent of the shelter admissions in New York
City are ex-offenders. Linda Gibbs, our current Deputy Mayor
and former Commissioner of Homeless Services, once accused
me of creating homelessness in the jails. It is a real problem.
There are impediments to housing; for example, many offenders
leaving our jails have family living in public housing,
so by virtue of their conviction they may be barred from
returning to that housing or put their family at risk of
eviction. Clearly, it is hard to obtain housing without
an income stream, and there is a crisis of affordable housing
in New York, but we are trying to break through that. We
have reached an agreement with the New York City Housing
Authority for an experimental program, in which they are
waiving the prohibition to enable ex-offenders who have
successfully made the transition from jail to the community
after a period of 90 to 180 days in a transitional housing
program and can make use of Section 8 vouchers. We are also
trying to use good behavior and work as an incentive to
obtain that Section 8 voucher to make the housing more affordable.
I believe that every individual—no matter how heinous
their crime or how long their sentence— should leave
prison through a halfway house that is part of their sentence.
When we sentence a person to prison we should make him spend
the last year of his sentence in a halfway house that the
state runs, which would help him find work, and save money,
and stay sober. Then he should be able to leave that halfway
house anytime after a certain number of days if he has saved
a certain amount of money from his earnings. Of course,
the problem is that at the very time that New York State
releases 20,000 people a year, most of them returning to
the New York City area, New York State has reduced the number
of halfway house beds located in the city; that is not necessarily
a criticism, it is just a reality.
One of the things that we have discovered among the men
leaving our jails is that, on the day of their release,
they have a plan to go live with someone; they are going
to go back to live with grandma or with mom or with a girlfriend,
and they have the best intentions. They swear they will
not go back to crime. They swear they are not going to use
drugs. They swear they are going to work and to help support
that household, but after three months of living on the
couch, not finding work, not having any privacy, it all
falls apart. What if we gave them a subsidy so that they
could pay grandma or mom part of the rent? For a lousy $100
a week we might help them stay with family instead of in
the shelter. It seems to me that would be a wise and prudent
investment.
MR. TRAVIS: A couple of years ago, I gave a talk
and started with the phrase "It's time to end parole
as we know it," borrowing from the welfare reform mantra
of President Clinton. While Mr. Horn and I disagree on some
things, we agree that it is time for a very radical change
in the way we think about things.
From an employment point of view the question is, is it
possible to do something while in prison and while returning
to community to reverse what Bruce Western and others have
documented as the lifetime diminution of earnings? How does
this work? Somebody who has a felony conviction has a lifetime
diminution of earnings of 10 to 30 percent, which means
that they may be employed, but they are not employed on
the same sort of trajectory as other people. The result
is that we have a significant depression of earnings concentrated
in a small number of communities.
Oregon has adopted a full employment prison by public referendum,
saying that they want prisoners to be working 35 hours a
week or doing something else like an education program,
getting a GED, or working on their drug addiction. I would
add, as did Oregon, that to the extent possible we want
the private sector to be in there providing the jobs so
that there is a continuity from the same employer inside
and outside as well as a continuity of skills. That would
take some work with unions and require creating some tax
incentives for those private employers, but we should do
it because there is a great public benefit. In Europe, jobs
in prison are union jobs, so the union is there overseeing
inmates, and then they come out with a union card. We have
a long way to go. The idea of the full employment prison
is to think of prison as a place to improve human capital,
but that only works if we couple it with something back
in the community. The Philadelphia public, according to
a Public Agenda poll, was surprised to learn that work was
not a part of re-entry. In a classic American sense, the
public expects work to be part of the re-entry experience,
and right now, we are not providing it.
