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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.