WASHINGTON – The Justice Department has announced that it will be stepping up efforts aimed at reducing the number of federal inmates who commit crimes after their release from prison, stating it will offer an additional $62 million in grants for “re-entry” programs aimed at helping the transition of former prisoners back into their communities.
The announcement comes as legislators have begun debating the merits of federal legislation, due to expire soon, called the Second Chance Act. Since 2008, this law has been the federal government’s primary means by which to address the negative impact that a prison term can have on inmates – and the potential for that harm to translate into social ramifications for communities after a prisoner’s release.
“We must support these programs because we recognize that … better treatment, and expanded access to the resources you need, can result in better outcomes and brighter futures for many who come into contact with the criminal justice system,” Attorney General Eric Holder said last week while attending a graduation ceremony at a St. Louis federal “re-entry court,” calling on Congress to reauthorize the Second Chance Act.
“I’m passionate about programs like this one – programs that can help strong, committed individuals … to break that cycle and gain the tools you need to re-enter your communities and lead productive and fulfilling lives.”
Holder, a former judge and U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., noted that his belief in the importance of such re-entry programs came from first-hand experience.
“I learned how drug abuse, crime and incarceration can trap people in a destructive cycle – a cycle that weakens communities, tears families apart, and destroys individual lives,” he said.
“Day after day, I watched lines of young people, most often young men of color, stream through my courtroom. Too many of the faces I saw became familiar, because too many of the people I sentenced served their time, were released from prison, and sooner or later returned to the same behavior that had led them to my courtroom in the first place.”
Indeed, for all the money that the United States spends on its prison system – currently some $6.4 billion a year, a quarter of the Justice Department’s budget and the highest in the world – it gets surprisingly little in return. According to a 2011 study by the Pew Center for the States, between 40 and 50 percent of released inmates are back in prison within three years, while other estimates are even higher.
“[T]he system designed to deter [prisoners] from continued criminal behavior clearly is falling short,” the report notes. “That is an unhappy reality, not just for offenders, but for the safety of American communities.”
Safe transition
Faced with such findings and motivated particularly by increasing budgetary constraints (and ever-more-dire budget debates), legislators at the state and federal levels have begun to move. Indeed, much of the innovative thinking in criminal justice reforms has come from the state level, where budgetary realities have more quickly eviscerated the ideological debates that have long characterized federal policy on the issue.
The first major recent push on recidivism by the federal government came to fruition in 2011, when Attorney General Holder unveiled a pan-government body, the Federal Interagency Reentry Council. Including representation from 20 federal agencies, the council aims to reduce recidivism and “assist those who return from prison and jail in becoming productive citizens.”
The council’s work has been well received by activists working on criminal justice issues, though poor statistics linger across the country. Of the 700,000 inmates released each year, some 75 percent are said to have substance-abuse problems, while many struggle to find work. Further, federal legislators have insisted in putting up additional roadblocks to this process.
“We really need to work to reform policies that create barriers when people get out of prison, including ongoing efforts in Congress to offer amendments to deny certain federal benefits to those convicted of a felony,” Jeremy Haile, a federal advocacy counsel with the Sentencing Project, a Washington watchdog group, told Mint Press.
“In the farm bill, for instance, provisions would refuse food stamps or federal housing to anyone with certain convictions. It doesn’t cost money not to erect these barriers, but it makes it very hard for someone returning home to transition safely.”
The Second Chance Act is a central piece of the government’s seriousness on tackling recidivism. While advocates are pushing for the legislation’s reauthorization, introduced last week, they emphasize that an increased emphasis at the Justice Department on re-entry programs and innovative thinking on alternatives to incarceration will also be key.
“Helping formerly incarcerated people obtain access to housing, employment, and other services that they need to reenter society is smart justice,” said Laura W. Murphy, director of the Washington legislative office for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “This and other recent announcements by the attorney general related to federal criminal justice system reform are of critical importance given our country’s addiction to incarceration.”
In the eyes of many, the Second Chance Act has never really had a chance to blossom following its passage into law in 2008.
“This act had a lot of promise when it was first signed. The problem was that although it was authorized at several hundred million dollars in terms of grants for recidivism-reduction programming, appropriators never actually appropriated the money needed to fulfill its promise and have as big an impact as possible,” the Sentencing Project’s Haile said.
“The version that was introduced last week authorizes funding at a much lower level, which is probably more realistic in terms of what appropriators may be willing to spend.”
The gap in funding is partly ideological, with some legislators in Congress seeing the issue of the post-prison transition back into society as a community responsibility – and hence a state, rather than federal, prerogative. For other appropriators, re-entry programs have simply never been a significant priority. But advocates such as Haile say this is misguided, a view that is being increasingly embraced across the ideological spectrum.
“The issue itself, of trying to provide job training and drug treatment for people coming back from prison, is very important and the need is very great,” Haile said. “A lot of that is because we’ve had this huge growth in the prison system in the last 30 to 40 years. The vast majority of those people are going to return to their communities at some point, so it is imperative that we have programming and treatment in place so they can make a safe transition back into society.”
Early release
Over the past three decades, on the back of a “tough on crime” mentality spearheaded by conservative lawmakers in Washington, the federal prison population has increased by an unprecedented 800 percent, from 25,000 to 219,000 inmates. Today, the country imprisons some 716 people out of every 100,000, far more than any other country, leading to an overcrowding epidemic in federal prisons that critics say is bad for prisoners, prisons and U.S. communities.
The vast majority of this incarceration increase has been driven by drug offenses, particularly non-violent ones. Yet a set of far-reaching reforms has been proposed in recent months that could dramatically alter the face of the U.S. criminal justice system, as federal authorities use growing bipartisan momentum to put in place policies aimed at significantly reducing the size of the country’s bloated federal prison population.
Among the most important of these new policy proposals are guidelines – and potential legislation – that would cut down on the use of so-called mandatory minimum sentencing, particularly for non-violent drug offenders. At the same time, federal authorities are also focusing on reducing the prisoner population at the “back end”, those who could potentially be released before their formal prison term expires.
“Given current prison overcrowding, there is a looming question about those folks who are already incarcerated,” Julie Samuels, a senior fellow with the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a think tank here, told Mint Press. “We can decrease the flow, but we’re still faced with the situation right now in which the Bureau of Prisons is 30 to 40 percent overcrowded.”
Samuels recently co-authored a major report for the Urban Institute, released earlier this month, that projects that overcrowding will continue to increase over the coming decade, eventually leaving prisons up to 55 percent over capacity. That would mean 50,000 more prisoners than federal facilities are rated to hold.
“Given the extent and immediacy of this problem, our conclusion is that while it’s very important to think about changing sentencing laws, it will also be important to look at the current population and think about what the back-end options might be,” she said.
“In the federal system, there are very few ways by which a prisoner can reduce his or her sentence. That’s different from the states, where there are lots of options – and remember, there is no parole in the federal system. Yet even under the programs that do currently allow for time off, prisoners often aren’t receiving the full shortening of sentences available.”
Some argue, then, that the Bureau of Prisons hasn’t taken full advantage of the options it already has. For instance, under the most prominent sentence-reduction initiative, an intensive substance-abuse program, prisoners are able to get up to a year’s reduction in their sentence. But Samuels said credit for this full year often isn’t given.
Similar criticisms have been made in the past, including by the prison system’s inspector general, about the bureau’s use of compassionate release for elderly or sick inmates. Indeed, that policy has now been tweaked, and new discussions currently underway now could lead to additional reforms.
“Our analysis suggests that the Bureau of Prisons could do slightly more with its current discretion, but the question becomes whether they could manage this better or whether Congress needs to provide more resources,” Samuels said.
“While many have blamed the Bureau of Prisons for overcrowding, the bureau can’t control who walks in the door. Now that people are really looking into these issues, the federal government needs to consider who actually needs to serve a prison term and for how long.”