Another By-Product of the Recession: Ex-Convicts

In 2000, when Glenn Martin was leaving prison in upstate Attica, N.Y., after serving six years for robbery, the correctional officer thanked him in a way he’d never forget: “He said my being there helped pay for his boat, and that when my son came there, he would help pay for his son’s boat.”

As cruel and obnoxious as the comment was, it was a reasonable expectation. Of the 6,000 residents of Attica, nearly two-thirds are prisoners, most from troubled neighborhoods in Martin’s hometown of New York City, about an eight-hour drive south. Like so many other states over the past three decades, as the nation’s prison population has exploded from 307,000 to 1.6 million, New York has come to see incarceration as a major source of employment. The corrections department is the state’s largest agency, employing more than 31,000 people at 70 institutions; at $40,000 per inmate, the state spends $2.5 billion a year. (See pictures of crime in Middle America.)

It was, many observers agree, never the best use of taxpayer money. And now, with so many states facing major budget crises, it looks like it won’t continue at the same pace much longer. California’s prisons are so overcrowded and underfunded that a federal judge recently ruled that the state must release roughly a third of its 158,000 prisoners by 2012. The New York State legislature is close to scrapping the draconian Rockefeller drug laws that, by imposing mandatory sentences rather than rehab treatment, have kept many otherwise law-abiding drug users in prison for years. Other states, such as Michigan, New Jersey and North Carolina, are either releasing some prisoners who have served their minimum time or putting drug offenders in treatment programs instead of prison. (Read about challenges to New York’s drug sentencing laws.)

This potential flood of ex-convicts re-entering society, on top of the more than 700,000 inmates who return each year, poses major challenges for government agencies and nonprofit organizations struggling with budget crises. Even without the expected surge of prisoners coming home, their efforts haven’t proved particularly successful at stopping the revolving door of recidivism. Until recently, “most people got 50 bucks, a bus ticket and let out the door without any preparation — they land back in their old neighborhoods at four in the morning where there’s drugs — so what would we expect in terms of them being successful?” wonders Amy Solomon, a scholar at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. (Read about one ex-inmate’s struggle to re-enter society.)

More than two-thirds of former inmates are packed off to prison again within three years, but about half of these are due to technical violations like not reporting in time to parole officers or failing drug tests. Parole and probation officers are typically funded just enough to be able to detect violations but not enough to offer help, say, for drug rehabilitation. This revolving door is very expensive; it adds $1 billion a year in costs to California’s overburdened penal system.

The Second Chance Act, signed last year by then President Bush, was a welcome acknowledgment that the country needs to get better at reintegration. States, now under orders to systematically review barriers to ex-cons’ finding housing and jobs, are partnering with an array of local organizations that have long dealt with newly released felons. New York, for instance, is opening a number of specialized re-entry units closer to home, where inmates spend the last three to four months of their sentences meeting with state and community social-service agencies to help line up housing, jobs and information on drug-rehab programs and reconnect with their families and neighborhoods.

See the top 10 crime stories of 2008.

The privately run Center for Employment Opportunities in lower Manhattan helps hundreds of inmates each year acquire basic skills and find employment while earning an income doing maintenance work on public buildings; close to 13,000 former inmates have found jobs through the organization, and simply enrolling there cuts the chances of landing back in prison by half. “Our people are usually in the back of the line for jobs, but [in the current economy] that line just got a lot longer,” says CEO and executive director Mindy Tarlow, who notes that it is taking twice as many calls these days vs. the pre-recession days (200 vs. 100) just to get a lead on a job. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

One of the pioneers in the re-entry field is the Fortune Society, a New York City organization run almost entirely by former inmates. Fortune offers help on all fronts to those lucky enough to win one of 70 beds in its granite-stone facility in West Harlem known as the Castle — a former Catholic girls’ school, yeshiva and onetime crack house. Though the organization is dealing with its own budget cutbacks, it recently broke ground for a $43 million mixed-use building right next door, which will have 114 units. As more ex-cons re-enter society, the Fortune Society expects it will soon be working with about 5,000 people a year, up from about 3,500 now. “I’d be in a problem situation or maybe even dead if it weren’t for Fortune Society,” says Victor Chapman, 44, a Castle resident who served 3½ years in prison for assault (committed to support a crack habit) but who now appears at college literature courses to talk about the Society’s therapeutic oral-history project that is helping him write his autobiography. (Read TIME’s 1971 cover story about Attica prison.)

Supporting programs like these should be a no-brainer; they have a much better chance of keeping people out of prison for good, and they do so for a lot less money than prison would cost the state. That’s the idea behind the New York Justice Corps pilot program, in which $4.8 million is being spent in the South Bronx and the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn to fund 275 young offenders (18-to-24-year-olds) working to restore community centers and weatherize homes over two years. “We are making an investment in the community but also helping people see these former inmates as assets for the community,” says Debbie Makumal, director of the Prisoner Re-Entry Institute at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

But realizing these potential savings is easier said than done. New York State is thought to have the fastest-shrinking prison population in the country — from a peak in 1999 of 71,600 to fewer than 60,000 this year — but so far only some prison wards have been closed, not entire facilities, which would net larger savings. That’s at least partially because upstate Republicans regard prisons as economic engines. For that reason, closures have to be linked with upstate development plans for the same communities, insists Glenn Martin, the aforementioned former Attica inmate, who is now a Fortune Society vice president working to change state and federal policies.

For Michael P. Jacobson, a former NYC Corrections commissioner and now director of the Vera Institute of Justice, there is a “historical moment” afoot now to abandon what he and others in the field call the failed policy of “mass incarceration” in favor of systematic and adequately funded re-entry efforts. But nowhere, he cautions, is there such a gap between what we should do — what we know to be the right thing to do policywise — and what we actually do.

See pictures of men exonerated of their alleged crimes.