The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It is home to a little less than 5% of the world’s population, but holds 25% of the world’s prisoners.[4] According to a U.S. Justice Department Report, as of this year, over 7.2 million people are in prison, on probation, or on parole. That means 1 in every 32 Americans are in the system.[5][6] According to the International Center of Prison Studies at King’s College London, out of that 7.2 million 2.3 million are behind bars. China is in a far second place with 1.6 million, although China’s population is over 4 times that of America.
Not only does the U.S. have the highest number of inmates, the United States is number 1 in highest incarceration rates as well. America has about 751 people in prison for every 100,000 in population.[2] In comparison to other industrialized nations, Russia comes in 2nd with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 in population. For comparison, with other industrialized countries, Germany has 88, England’s rate is 151, and Japan has a rate of 63. The median of the world is 125. This is about 1/6th of the American rate.
If this keeps up, we're going to eventually have more felons than we do citizens. I guess that'll make it easier for us to find jobs.
The real shame here is that for many coming out of prison, the desire to get one's life "on track" is pretty strong. Unfortuantely, it doesn't take long for the felon to discover that although he may be out from behind bars, his DOC number might as well be tattooed across his forehead, since just about any job that pays enough to keep him/her from starving while living under the local overpass is off limits to them.
Frustration breeds hopelessness. Hopelessness breeds contempt.
Not exactly what we're hoping to inculcate in our ex felons, is it?
Another By-Product of the Recession: A Flood of Ex-Convicts
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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.
Related
(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.
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.
- Find this article at:
- http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1883575,00.html
Giving Felons a Second Chance
Published March 06, 2009 @ 05:31AM PST
Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis wrote an eloquent and thoughtful post yesterday about sitting in a courtroom while an employee was sentenced to four years in prison for computer security crimes committed when he was younger. Calacanis' colleagues hired John Schiefer without knowing he was accused of infecting 250,000 computers in his youth and may not have hired him if they had known. But now Calacanis says he's glad he gave Schiefer a chance, and that his experience with John "taught me a lot about society, computer crime and rehabilitation."
I consider myself a fairly decent judge of character, and after spending months with John, I’m convinced he was an angry stupid kid when he launched his botnet attack (which did .000000001% of the damage it could have). Now he’s an adult who just wants to make a decent living, spend time with his significant other and breathe the clean air off the Pacific Ocean by our offices in Santa Monica.
John’s going to have to spend a couple of years in jail for what he did. Certainly we have to punish those who’ve committed crimes. But watching this go down, I wish in my heart of hearts that judge had given John a sentence from home, where we could have supervised him.
Calacanis' eye-opening experience doesn't only apply to computer crime. People make mistakes and everyone deserves a second chance. If employers large and small begin to build second chances into their corporate social responsibility practices, we could be on our way to a shrinking prison population and healthier communities.As you might expect, there are no major companies that publicly offer a second chance to people with felony convictions. Our society would simply rather hear that a company supports head-start education than prisoner reentry efforts. But both are important, especially when finding a job is even harder in this market.
We release 700,000 people from prison and jail every year. By excluding these people from our work force, we contribute to the cycle of recidivism - people without a job are more likely to become involved in drugs, prostitution and theft.
There are organizations out there, such as the H.I.R.E. network, that will help formerly incarcerated people find jobs. State agencies can be instrumental in helping people find jobs, too. But we need some leadership from corporations on this issue, too. Perhaps web companies like Mahalo can lead the way.
