Inmates overcharged on debt to society

I'm old enough to remember when they used to speak of rehabilitating prisoners instead of simply punishing them. Nowadays, nearly every government policy works against that concept. Media Awareness Project archived a really good Wall St. Journal piece on the difficulty ex-cons have in reintegrating into society. The deck is stacked against them, making it particularly difficult for women who have children.

Take the case of Jacqueline Smith, a model employee at Applebees. After 9 years in prison, she managed to obtain the job, receiving promotions and awards but is forced to commute over an hour on public transportation with her young daughter because the only housing she can get is at a Manhattan shelter for female ex-convicts where she and her daughter have been living for more than a year. Even sadder is the case of Kellie Owens.

In 1993, Ms. Owens, who had just finished her sophomore year at Santa Rosa Junior College in Northern California, obtained LSD for her ex-boyfriend and mailed it to him in Georgia. He was caught and cooperated with authorities against those he had enlisted to secure drugs, including Ms. Owens. He was sentenced to two years while she received 10.

She was determined to learn a trade while on the inside and took up firefighting.

For more than five years, she slogged through classes and training, entering smoke-filled rooms with her oxygen mask blackened to simulate rescue situations and navigating the Appalachian mountain roads near the prison in a yellow fire truck. ...She eventually rose to the fire team's top rank of lieutenant, garnering 300 hours of training and 100 hours at the scenes of actual fires in the towns outside the prison.

She should have been a prime candidate for a good job when she got out but state law prohibits the hire of ex-felons in her home state. Other inmates can't get ID, thus can't get jobs and all are denied public housing and educational assistance. It's a recipe for recidivism.

The obstacles were largely enacted during the "tough on crime" phase of lawmaking which has filled our jails and fueled the growth of the prison-industrial economy. Unfortunately, while that may have rescued some rural counties who depend on the employment the prisons generate, overall it simply creates conditions conducive to reoffending which come at a greater social cost. Crime hasn't changed much but U.S. taxpayers spent $60 billion on corrections in 2002 at the local, state and federal levels, up from $9 billion two decades earlier.

We spend more on prisons than schools. Think about that. But there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

After years of pushing for tougher sentences, politicians in Washington are rethinking their approach. The Second Chance Act, hammered out by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and introduced last month, would provide more than $80 million in grants for programs to help ex-offenders re-enter society.

Here's hoping they get it passed. It could only help.