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Prison infographic

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Prison Interviews

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Study on why so many ex-prisoners end up back in prison 

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Study on why so many ex-prisoners end up back in prison 

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Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty

One of the most frequently cited and dispiriting statistics about the American criminal justice system is that more than half of state prisoners end up returning to prison within five years of their release.* These numbers come from a study conducted by the federal government's Bureau of Justice Statistics, in which researchers tracked about 400,000 people from around the country who were released from state prisons in 2005. The strong implication of the findings is that people who are incarcerated are extremely likely to reoffend once they're free and that most of them spend their lives in and out of correctional facilities.

But what if the BJS's findings have been fundamentally misunderstood? That's the provocative contention of a recent paper published in the journal Crime & Delinquency, the title of which is "Following Incarceration, Most Released Offenders Never Return to Prison."

The paper, which was produced by researchers at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based public policy firm Abt Associates and circulated online this week by criminal justice experts, argues that the conventional wisdom about recidivism in America is flatly wrong. In reality, the authors of the paper report, 2 out of 3 people who serve time in prison never come back, and only 11 percent come back multiple times.

The reason for the shocking discrepancy between these new findings and those of the BJS, according to Abt's William Rhodes, is that the BJS used a sample population in which repeat offenders were vastly overrepresented.

I called Rhodes to ask him about why this happened and how he and his co-authors avoided the same problem in their analysis. His explanation for why the recidivism problem is not nearly as bad as many of us have believed is below; our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.
Let's start with the conventional wisdom on recidivism in the U.S. What is it, and where did it come from?
The conventional wisdom is that there's a very high rate of recidivism, where recidivism is defined as being arrested for a new crime or having your community supervision status revoked for a technical violation.

I know the Bureau of Justice Statistics has collected statistics on recidivism at least twice, maybe three times, and what they do is start with a sample of offenders who are released from prison during a given year, then match those release records with criminal history records to determine who recidivates. Then they compute their statistics-the rate at which the released offenders are arrested for new crimes and the rate at which they're readmitted to prison-by observing the individuals in their sample over a period of some years. They're not controversial statistics. There's no manipulation that goes on. It's purely tabulation.
So the way it works is they choose a year and track a cohort of people in their sample and see who comes back? It seems pretty straightforward. So what's wrong with their results?
It is difficult to explain to a nonstatistician. I try to use an analogy: Suppose that I were asked to describe a population of people who go to shopping malls. What I might do is go to the mall and perform an "intercept survey"-that is, I'd randomly select people who are entering the mall and ask them about themselves-record their age, sex, race, and frequency of visiting the mall. The problem is, I'd probably do that over a pretty short period of time, like a week. So I'd get a lot of people who are frequent mall visitors and fewer people who aren't. You know, if you go to a mall you'll see an elderly population who go daily, to exercise by walking through the mall. You'll also see a number of people who simply like malls, and maybe they go weekly. Or you'll find, occasionally, people like me, who go about once a year when they need to buy a washing machine or something. If you did a simple tabulation of all the people you intercepted during a week you'd get a large proportion of frequent mall visitors. And they wouldn't be representative of people who visit malls-they'd be representative of frequent mall visitors.
And the same thing is happening with the Bureau of Justice Statistics when they take a sample of people who have been released from prison during a given year.
Right. They're not attempting to be misleading. What they're reporting is true: If you take people who are released from prison during a given year, here's the rate at which they'll return. But it gets translated in people's heads as, "Here's what happens to offenders in general."

In truth what you have is two groups of offenders: those who repeatedly do crimes and accumulate in prisons because they get recaptured, reconvicted, and resentenced; and those who are much lower risk, and most of them will go to prison once and not come back.
So the problem with taking a snapshot of a particular year, the way the BJS has done it, is you're more likely to have people in your sample who come back a lot than you are to have people who don't come back at all.
That's exactly right, yeah.
What data is your study based on?
At Abt Associates we assemble data into something called the National Corrections Reporting Program. It records prison terms for offenders across almost all of the states. For a large number of states, that data goes back to 2000. So we can observe when somebody enters and when somebody exits prison, and that allows us to look at individual offenders and say, "Given that they've been incarcerated at least once, how frequently do they come back?" So you're looking at a large number of offenders, over a nearly 15-year period, and what you find is that most of those offenders do not come back. They're incarcerated, they serve their term, they don't return.
So your data set contains information at the individual level? You know when a specific person went in and when he got out?
That's correct. If you were in the dataset, we would track you. We probably wouldn't have your name, but we'd have an identification code that the state would issue you as an inmate.
So what do you have to do to correct for the overrepresentation of repeat offenders in the dataset?
You weight them differently. It's not arbitrary of course-the weighting is done so that you have an appropriate representation of all offenders rather than an overrepresentation of high-rate offenders. In order to get the right weights, you have to be able to observe a long period-the 15 years we look at.
So the reason you're looking at the stretch of time, rather than just one year, is it gives you what you need to know in order to weight specific individuals the right amount. So looking at your findings and the findings that usually get reported, it's almost like we have these two very different realities. We have one that says "most people come back" and we have one that says "most people don't come back." Given that, as you said, there's nothing misleading about what the BJS was doing in their analysis, what is going on? And which one should we look at if what we're interested in is knowing how likely it is that someone who has served time in an American prison will return?
What's important is being clear about what question you're trying to answer. If your question is, "Of all the people who go to prison, what's the rate at which they come back?" then our calculations are better. But if you wanted to ask a question about a specific release cohort-about people who are released during a given year-and how frequently they come back, then the other methodology is the appropriate one. But they're questions about two different populations of people. The first one is the population of offenders in general.
So what are the BJS numbers good for?
Well, there are reasons for using data like that. You might do it if you wanted to evaluate whether a program you introduced in prison reduced recidivism. So you'd want to look at a particular cohort that was released during a particular year and judge whether the treatment you introduced was effective or not.

But if you want to look at how offenders actually interact with the criminal justice system, then the methods we propose are more appropriate.
My understanding of the lives of people who go to prison was very much colored by the notion that they tend to be incarcerated over and over-that they come out of prison and they have a very small chance of staying free. What you're saying is that's only really true for a certain subset of the population of people who are incarcerated.
Yes, that's correct. Most people really do not return to prison. They're not caught in what we call the cycle of incarceration. They don't churn, to use one of the popular words. But some do.
Are there policy implications from this that you've thought about?
Yeah, I think there are. It would take more careful study, but others have pointed out that there are very low-level offenders who manage to readjust, and you ought to focus the rehabilitation resources you have on those individuals who are high-risk offenders. They're the ones who are going to benefit most from treatment-or, I should say, society's going to benefit most from treating them. The problem, of course, is identifying them. That's why criminologists have attempted to develop risk assessment tools, to identify the high-risk offenders and treat them, while almost letting the others recover by themselves.
Correction, Nov. 2, 2015: This article originally misstated that a Bureau of Justice Statistics study on recidivism found that 68 percent of state prisoners ended up back behind bars within three years of their release, and about 75 percent came back within five. These numbers referred to rates of re-arrest, not re-imprisonment. The BJS study found that about 50 and 55 percent of state prisoners returned to prison within three and five years, respectively. (Return.)

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Why Do So Many Ex-Cons End Up Back in Prison? Maybe They Don't, Says a Provocative New Study.

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One of the most frequently cited and dispiriting statistics about the American criminal justice system is that more than half of state prisoners end up returning to prison within five years of their release.* These numbers come from a study conducted by the federal government's Bureau of Justice Statistics, in which researchers tracked about 400,000 people from around the country who were released from state prisons in 2005.

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The reasons why Rehabilitation is better than Prison

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The reasons why Rehabilitation is better than Prison

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Link: http://workingeastbay.org/whats-new/end-mass-incarceration/

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Sign that says End Mass Incarceration
Link: http://www.southerncoalition.org/tag/end-mass-incarceration-week/

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Protesting against mass incarceration
Link: https://www.emaze.com/@AFWIFZQR/Mass-Incarceration

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Article about what is contributing to mass incarceration

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Article about what is contributing to mass incarceration

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Non-violent drug crimes resulting in imprisonment are happening in excess and contributing to high numbers of incarceration - Aliana

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From the September 21, 2015, issue of NR

America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, outstripping even Russia, Cuba, Rwanda, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Though America is home to only about one-twentieth of the world's population, we house almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Since the mid 1970s, American prison populations have boomed, multiplying sevenfold while the population has increased by only 50 percent. Why?

Liberals blame racism and the "War on Drugs," in particular long sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. This past July, in a speech to the NAACP, President Obama insisted that "the real reason our prison population is so high" is that "over the last few decades, we've also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before." The War on Drugs, he suggested, is just a continuation of America's "long history of inequity in the criminal-justice system," which has disproportionately harmed minorities.

Two days later, Obama became the first sitting president to visit a prison. Speaking immediately after his visit, the president blamed mandatory drug sentencing as a "primary driver of this mass-incarceration phenomenon." To underscore that point, he met with half a dozen inmates at the prison, all of whom had been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. Three days earlier, he had commuted the federal prison terms of 46 nonviolent drug offenders, most of whom had been sentenced to at least 20 years' imprisonment.

The president is echoing what liberal criminologists and lawyers have long charged. They blame our prison boom on punitive, ever-longer sentences tainted by racism, particularly for drug crimes. Criminologists coined the term "mass incarceration" or "mass imprisonment" a few decades ago, as if police were arresting and herding suspects en masse into cattle cars bound for prison. Many blame this phenomenon on structural racism, as manifested in the War on Drugs.

No one has captured and fueled this zeitgeist better than Michelle Alexander, an ACLU lawyer turned Ohio State law professor. Her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is, as Cornel West put it, "the secular bible for a new social movement in early twenty-first-century America." She condemns "mass incarceration . . . as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow." Ex-felons, like victims of Jim Crow, are a stigmatized underclass, excluded from voting, juries, jobs, housing, education, and public benefits. This phenomenon "is not - as many argue - just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new racial caste system at work," like Jim Crow and slavery before it. She even implies that this system is just the latest manifestation of whites' ongoing racist conspiracy to subjugate blacks, pointing to the CIA's support of Nicaraguan contras who supplied cocaine to black neighborhoods in the U.S.
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Like President Obama, Alexander blames mass incarceration on the racially tinged War on Drugs. "In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase." And the War on Drugs was supposedly driven by coded racial appeals, in which elite whites galvanized poor whites to vote Republican by scapegoating black drug addicts. The fault, she insists, does not lie with criminals or violence. "Violent crime is not responsible for the prison boom. . . . The uncomfortable reality is that convictions for drug offenses - not violent crime - are the single most important cause of the prison boom in the United States," and minorities are disproportionately convicted of drug crimes.

Alexander's critique is catnip to liberals. The New Jim Crow stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year and remains Amazon's best-selling book in criminology. And it dovetailed with liberal and libertarian pundits' calls to legalize or decriminalize drugs, or at least marijuana, as the cure for burgeoning prisons.

President Obama's and Alexander's well-known narrative, however, doesn't fit the facts. Prison growth has been driven mainly by violent and property crime, not drugs. As Fordham law professor John Pfaff has shown, more than half of the extra prisoners added in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s were imprisoned for violent crimes; two thirds were in for violent or property crimes. Only about a fifth of prison inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses, and only a sliver of those are in for marijuana. Moreover, many of these incarcerated drug offenders have prior convictions for violent crimes. The median state prisoner serves roughly two years before being released; three quarters are released within roughly six years.

For the last several decades, arrest rates as a percentage of crimes - including drug arrests - have been basically flat, as have sentence lengths. What has driven prison populations, Pfaff proves convincingly, is that arrests are far more likely to result in felony charges: Twenty years ago, only three eighths of arrests resulted in felony charges, but today more than half do. Over the past few decades, prosecutors have grown tougher and more consistent.
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Nor is law enforcement simply a tool of white supremacy to oppress blacks. As several prominent black scholars have emphasized, law-abiding blacks often want more and better law enforcement, not less. Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy emphasized that "blacks have suffered more from being left unprotected or underprotected by law enforcement authorities than from being mistreated as suspects or defendants," though the latter claims often get more attention. Most crime is intra-racial, so black victims suffer disproportionately at the hands of black criminals. Yale law professors Tracey Meares and James Forman Jr. have observed that minority-neighborhood residents often want tough enforcement of drug and other laws to ensure their safety and protect their property values. The black community is far from monolithic; many fear becoming crime victims and identify more with them than they do with victims of police mistreatment.

There is no racist conspiracy, nor are we locking everyone up and throwing away the key. Most prisoners are guilty of violent or property crimes that no orderly society can excuse.

Black Democrats, responding to their constituents' understandable fears, have played leading roles in toughening the nation's drug laws. In New York, black activists in Harlem, the NAACP Citizens' Mobilization Against Crime, and New York's leading black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, advocated what in the 1970s became the Rockefeller drug laws, with their stiff mandatory minimum sentences. At the federal level, liberal black Democrats representing black New York City neighborhoods supported tough crack-cocaine penalties. Representative Charles Rangel, from Harlem, chaired the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control when Congress enacted crack-cocaine sentences that were much higher than those for powder cocaine. Though many have come to regret it, the War on Drugs was bipartisan and cross-racial.

More fundamentally, The New Jim Crow wrongly absolves criminals of responsibility for their "poor choices." Alexander opens her book by analogizing the disenfranchisement of Jarvious Cotton, a felon on parole, to that of his great-great-grandfather (for being a slave), his great-grandfather (beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for trying to vote), his grandfather (intimidated by the Klan into not voting), and his father (by poll taxes and literacy tests).
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But Cotton's ancestors were disenfranchised through violence and coercion solely because of their race. Cotton is being judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his choices. He chose to commit a felony, and Alexander omits that his felony was not a nonviolent drug crime, but murdering 17-year-old Robert Irby during an armed robbery. All adults of sound mind know the difference between right and wrong. Poverty and racism are no excuses for choosing to break the law; most people, regardless of their poverty or race, resist the temptation to commit crimes. Cotton is not a helpless victim just like his ancestors, and it demeans the free will of poor black men to suggest otherwise.

So the stock liberal charges against "mass incarceration" simply don't hold water. There is no racist conspiracy, nor are we locking everyone up and throwing away the key. Most prisoners are guilty of violent or property crimes that no orderly society can excuse. Even those convicted of drug crimes have often been implicated in violence, as well as promoting addiction that destroys neighborhoods and lives.

But just because liberals are wrong does not mean the status quo is right. Conservatives cannot reflexively jump from critiquing the Left's preferred narrative to defending our astronomical incarceration rate and permanent second-class status for ex-cons. The criminal-justice system and prisons are big-government institutions. They are often manipulated by special interests such as prison guards' unions, and they consume huge shares of most states' budgets. And cities' avarice tempts police to arrest and jail too many people in order to collect fines, fees, tickets, and the like. As the Department of Justice found in its report following the Michael Brown shooting in Missouri, "Ferguson's law enforcement practices are shaped by the City's focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs." That approach poisons the legitimacy of law enforcement, particularly in the eyes of poor and minority communities.
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Conservatives also need to care more about ways to hold wrongdoers accountable while minimizing the damage punishment does to families and communities. Punishment is coercion by the state, and it disrupts not only defendants' lives but also their families and neighborhoods. Contrary to the liberal critique, we need to punish and condemn crimes unequivocally, without excusing criminals or treating them as victims. But we should be careful to do so in ways that reinforce rather than undercut conservative values, such as strengthening families and communities.

Conservatives cannot reflexively jump from critiquing the Left's preferred narrative to defending our astronomical incarceration rate and permanent second-class status for ex-cons.

Historically, colonial America punished crimes swiftly but temporarily. Only a few convicts were hanged, exiled, or mutilated. Most paid a fine, were shamed in the town square, sat in the stocks or pillory, or were whipped; all of these punishments were brief. Having condemned the crime, the colonists then forgave the criminal, who had paid his debt to society and the victim.

That was in keeping with the colonists' Christian faith in forgiveness, and it meant there was no permanent underclass of ex-cons. Preachers stressed that any of us could have committed such crimes, and we all needed to steel ourselves against the same temptations; the message was "There but for the grace of God go I." The point of criminal punishment was to condemn the wrong, humble the wrongdoer, induce him to make amends and learn his lesson, and then welcome him back as a brother in Christ. The punishment fell on the criminal, not on his family or friends, and he went right back to work.

Two centuries ago, the shift from shaming and corporal punishments to imprisonment made punishment an enduring status. Reformers had hoped that isolation and Bible reading in prison would induce repentance and law-abiding work habits, but it didn't turn out that way. Now we warehouse large numbers of criminals, in idleness and at great expense. By exiling them, often far away, prison severs them from their responsibilities to their families and communities, not to mention separating them from opportunities for gainful work. This approach is hugely disruptive, especially when it passes a tipping point in some communities and exacerbates the number of fatherless families. And much of the burden falls on innocent women and children, who lose a husband, boyfriend, or father as well as a breadwinner.
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Even though wrongdoers may deserve to have the book thrown at them, it is not always wise to exact the full measure of justice. There is evidence that prison turns people into career criminals. On the one hand, it cuts prisoners off from families, friends, and neighbors, who give them reasons to follow the law. Responsibilities as husbands and fathers are key factors that tame young men's wildness and encourage them to settle down: One longitudinal study found that marriage may reduce reoffending by 35 percent. But prison makes it difficult to maintain families and friendships; visiting in person is difficult and time-consuming, prisons are often far away, and telephone calls are horrifically expensive.

#share#On the other hand, prison does much to draw inmates away from lawful work. In the month before their arrest, roughly three quarters of inmates were employed, earning the bulk of their income lawfully. Many were not only taking care of their children but helping to pay for rent, groceries, utilities, and health care. But prison destroys their earning potential. Prisoners lose their jobs on the outside. Felony convictions also disqualify ex-cons from certain jobs, housing, student loans, and voting. Michigan economics professor Michael Mueller-Smith finds that spending a year or more in prison reduces the odds of post-prison employment by 24 percent and increases the odds of living on food stamps by 5 percent.

Conversely, prisons are breeding grounds for crime. Instead of working to support their own families and their victims, most prisoners are forced to remain idle. Instead of having to learn vocational skills, they have too much free time to hone criminal skills and connections. And instead of removing wrongdoers from criminogenic environments, prison clusters together neophytes and experienced recidivists, breeding gangs, criminal networks, and more crime. Thus, Mueller-Smith finds, long sentences on average breed much more crime after release than they prevent during the sentence. Any benefit from locking criminals up temporarily is more than offset by the crime increase caused when prison turns small-timers into career criminals. So conservatives' emphasis on retribution and responsibility, even when morally warranted, can quickly become counterproductive.

Another justification for prison is that the threat of punishment deters crime. The problem with deterrence, however, is that we overestimate prospective criminals' foresight and self-discipline. At its root, crime is generally a failure of self-discipline. Conservative criminologists such as the late James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein pin primary blame for crime on criminals' impulsively satisfying their immediate desires. They are short-sighted gamblers; who else would risk getting shot or arrested in order to steal $300 and a six-pack of beer from a convenience store?

Impulsiveness, short-sightedness, and risk-taking are even more pronounced among the very many wrongdoers whose crimes are fueled by some combination of drugs, alcohol, and mental illness. But those very qualities make it hard to deter them. We naïvely expect to deter these same short-sighted gamblers by threatening a chance of getting caught, convicted, and sent to prison for years far off in the future. Of course, optimistic, intoxicated risk-takers think they will not be caught. And if they have cycled through the juvenile-justice system and received meaningless probation for early convictions, the system has taught them exactly the wrong lessons.
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To deter crime effectively, punishment must speak to the same short-sighted wrongdoers who commit crime - not primarily through threats of long punishment far off in the future, but more through swift, certain sanctions that pay back victims while knitting wrongdoers back into the social fabric. If we make punishments immediate and predictable, yet modest, even drug addicts respond to them. Hawaii's Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) is an intensive-probation program that has the hardest-core drug users face random urinalysis one day each week; violators immediately go off to a weekend in jail. Though the Left paints drug addiction as a disease requiring costly medical intervention, drug addicts can in fact choose to stop using drugs. Under HOPE, even habitual drug users usually go clean on their own when faced with the immediate threat of two days in jail. Well over 80 percent stop using drugs right away and remain clean, without any further treatment.

The contrast with ordinary probation is stark. Probation officers juggle hundreds of cases, rarely see their clients, and routinely ignore multiple violations until they unpredictably send a client back to prison at some point in the future. Probation thus teaches probationers exactly the wrong lesson: that they are likely to get away with violations. It is no wonder that HOPE succeeds where ordinary probation fails.

Applying the same insight to prisons could revolutionize them. UCLA professor Mark Kleiman notes that most inmates could be released early and watched round the clock with webcams, drug and alcohol testing, and electronic ankle bracelets via GPS. They could live in government-rented apartments, see their families, and work at public-service jobs, all at much less expense than prison. These surveillance methods could enforce rules such as strict curfews, location limits, and bans on drug and alcohol use, with swift penalties for noncompliance. But the Left hates the idea, in part because its critics blame crime on society rather than on wrongdoers who need to be held accountable, disciplined, and taught structure and self-control.

The more that punishment exacerbates the breakdown of families and communities, the more the overweening state and its social services and law enforcement grow to fill the resulting void.

States like Texas and Georgia have already been experimenting with alternatives to endlessly building more prison cells. They have dramatically expanded inpatient and outpatient drug treatment as well as drug courts, diverted more minor offenders out of prison, kept juveniles out of state prison, and set up cheaper diversion beds for inmates who do not need to be in regular prison. For instance, Texas has begun creating special substance-abuse cells, so that repeat drunk drivers can get treatment instead of being housed with murderers and rapists. Risk-assessment tools can help to identify the sliver of recidivists and predators who pose the greatest danger and need long-term confinement.

Most of all, the government needs to work on reweaving the frayed but still extant fabric of criminals' families and communities. Both excessive crime and excessive punishment rend communal bonds, further atomizing society. The more that punishment exacerbates the breakdown of families and communities, the more the overweening state and its social services and law enforcement grow to fill the resulting void.
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The cornerstone of a conservative criminal-justice agenda should be strengthening families. More than half of America's inmates have minor children, more than 1.7 million in all; most of these inmates were living with minor children right before their arrest or incarceration. Inmates should meet with their families often. They should be incarcerated as close to home as possible, not deliberately sent to the other end of the state. Visitation rules and hours need to be eased, and extortionate collect-call telephone rates should come down to actual cost.

We should also pay more attention to the victims of crime. Victims are often friends, neighbors, or relatives of the wrongdoers who must go back to living among them. Though victims want to see justice done - including appropriate punishment - that does not generally mean the maximum possible sentence. In surveys, victims care much more about receiving restitution and apologies. So prison-based programs should encourage wrongdoers to meet with their victims if the victims are willing, to listen to their stories, apologize, and seek their forgiveness. Having to apologize and make amends makes most wrongdoers uncomfortable, teaching them lessons that they must learn.

Over-imprisonment is wrong because state coercion excessively disrupts work, families, and communities, the building blocks of society, with too little benefit to show for it.

Another important component of punishment should be work. It is madness that prisoners spend years in state-sponsored idleness punctuated by sporadic brutality. It is time to repeal Depression-era protectionist laws that ban prison-made goods from interstate commerce and require payment of prevailing-wage rates to prisoners (making prison industries unprofitable). All able-bodied prisoners should have to complete their educations and work, learning good work habits as well as marketable skills. One could even experiment with sending able-bodied prisoners without serious violent tendencies to enlist in the military, as used to be routine (think of the movie The Dirty Dozen). Some of prisoners' wages could go to support their families, cover some costs of incarceration, and make restitution to their victims.

Finally, inmates need religion and the religious communities that come with it. Most prisoners are eventually released, and we do almost nothing to help them reenter society, simply providing a bus ticket and perhaps $20. But faith-based programs like Prison Fellowship Ministries can transform cell blocks from wards of idleness or violence to orderly places of prayer, repentance, education, and work. After inmates are released, these faith-based groups can also perform much of the oversight, community reintegration, fellowship, and prayer that returning inmates need. Inmates must accept their responsibility, vow to mend their ways, and have fellow believers to hold them to those promises. Having a job, an apartment, and a congregation waiting for them after release from prison offers ex-cons a law-abiding alternative to returning to lives of crime.
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American criminal justice has drifted away from its moral roots. The Left has forgotten how to blame and punish, and too often the Right has forgotten how to forgive. Over-imprisonment is wrong, but not because wrongdoers are blameless victims of a white-supremacist conspiracy. It is wrong because state coercion excessively disrupts work, families, and communities, the building blocks of society, with too little benefit to show for it. Our strategies for deterring crime not only fail to work on short-sighted, impulsive criminals, but harden them into careerists. Criminals deserve punishment, but it is wise as well as humane to temper justice with mercy.

- Stephanos Bibas, a University of Pennsylvania professor of law and criminology and a former federal prosecutor, is the author of The Machinery of Criminal Justice (Oxford). This article originally appeared in the September 21, 2015, issue of National Review .

* National Review magazine content is typically available only to paid subscribers. Due to the immediacy of this article, it has been made available to you for free. To enjoy the full complement of exceptional National Review magazine content, sign up for a subscription today. A special discounted rate is available for you here.

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The Truth about Mass Incarceration | National Review

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From the September 21, 2015, issue of NR America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, outstripping even Russia, Cuba, Rwanda, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Though America is home to only about one-twentieth of the world's population, we house almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

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Education and Vocational Training in Prisons Reduces Recidivism, Improves Job Outlook

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Education and Vocational Training in Prisons Reduces Recidivism, Improves Job Outlook

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This article shows how education can transform and inmate to have a better future after being released. Education can help inmates reenter into society -Aliana

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Education and Vocational Training in Prisons Reduces Recidivism, Improves Job Outlook

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Inmates who participate in correctional education programs have a 43 percent lower odds of returning to prison than those who do not. Employment after release is 13 percent higher among prisoners who participated in either academic or vocational education programs than those who did not.

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This article demonstrates to importance of school (in prison) and how it can help prisoners from returning.
-Aliana

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When Devon Simmons started college, he was not a recent high school graduate living on a bucolic campus. He was a prisoner at the Otisville Correctional Facility, a medium security men's institution two hours from New York City.

"To finally utilize my talents was really a blessing, and in the process I got to learn new things, and look at things from a different perspective," says Simmons, 34, who began his coursework during the 12th year of a 15-year sentence.
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Simmons was part of the first cohort of students in the Prison-to-College Pipeline program, an initiative of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Otisville Correctional Facility that began in 2011.

The program is unique in that college credits earned behind bars are transferrable, allowing formerly incarcerated individuals to continue their education upon reentry. CUNY professors are brought in to teach at Otisville, and students in John Jay's criminal justice programs travel to the facility once a month to learn alongside their incarcerated peers, challenging minds and stigmas in equal measure.

"I had a sense of purpose, knowing that out of the hundreds that applied, I was one of the eight people who actually was accepted into the program," says Simmons, who will begin studying at John Jay College in the fall. "Because no one in my family actually went to college, so it gave me an opportunity to rewrite my story."

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Soon, 12,000 prisoners across the country will have the opportunity to rewrite their stories too. In June, John Jay College was one of 67 institutions nationwide asked to participate in the Second Chance Pell Pilot program, which makes incarcerated students eligible for federal education funding.

The program represents a major win for criminal justice reform - in 1994, the U.S. Congress banned Pell Grants to prisoners -and enables the John Jay program to nearly quadruple its enrollment, from about 30 to 150 students, says Dr. Baz Dreisinger, founding academic director of the Prison-to-College Pipeline and the author of "Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World."
Rewriting his story
Says Dreisinger, "There's increasing bipartisan recognition that education in the context of prisons is economically, morally and socially the right thing to do."

In 1999, four weeks before graduating from high school, Simmons was charged with first degree assault and sentenced to 15.5 years in prison. In his first decade behind bars, he earned his G.E.D. and continued to seek knowledge, learning about the law in pursuit of appealing his case and reading numerous autobiographies, including Malcolm X's, which gave him a sense of motivation and hope.

Despite being out of the classroom for 12 years, Simmons knew he wanted to apply to the Prison-to-College program. To qualify, inmates must have high school diplomas or G.E.D.s, be eligible for release within five years and go through a competitive application process that includes writing a letter of interest and passing the City University of New York (CUNY) assessment tests.

The program's coursework is rigorous, and students are encouraged to think critically about the world beyond prison walls. Simmons' assigned readings inspired him to study texts outside the class, such as Desmond Tutu's "No Future Without Forgivenes." For one assignment, Simmons wrote about the importance of funding education for incarcerated individuals.

"The truth of the matter is, higher education has proven to be cost-effective in regards to recidivism," says Simmons. "I don't see how society wouldn't embrace that when ultimately, these are individuals coming back to their community, right?"

Another aspect of the program he's most proud of is the ripple effect on those around him.

"I would like people to know how infectious it [education in prison] is. It spreads like a disease. Because I might be the one sitting in the dorm who's actually taking college courses in the facility. When other people in the dorms see me up late at night doing my papers, constantly reading books, they begin to wonder, and with that, they start asking questions and saying, 'Wow, if this guy could do it, maybe I could get my GED, maybe I could engage more in my vocation or trade,' or whatever it is they're doing to better themselves."

Now on the outside, Simmons is a student success mentor at John Jay, where he speaks in classrooms about the criminal justice system.

Says Simmons, "I have a lot of power when I come into these classrooms, especially these criminal justice classrooms, because I bring a different perspective. These textbooks, they talk about incarceration, and they talk about policing, but they don't really talk about the perspective from a prison's view, or they don't talk about the individual who has been arrested."

It's also in the classroom where Simmons has space - to voice his opinions, and challenge misconceptions about incarcerated individuals. And it's not just sitting in a classroom, but being anchored to an institution, that allows him to do so.

"Now if I wasn't in college, and I was just somebody [who got out of prison], people would say, why are you questioning police brutality? Why don't you just follow the rules? But as a student, it gives me the liberty to question everything. It gives me the liberty to question who, what, where, why. That's critical thinking. So, that's why I take great pride in being a student, because it alleviates the stigma as a convict who has a disregard for the system for the rules of society."

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Back on their feet, and finding their voice

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When Devon Simmons started college, he was not a recent high school graduate living on a bucolic campus. He was a prisoner at the Otisville Correctional Facility, a medium security men's institution two hours from New York City.

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Article about Incarceration vs. Education

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Article about Incarceration vs. Education

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Lists how much is spent on incarceration and education and proves that communities with high levels of incarceration often don't have successful schools -Aliana

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Since 1980, the U.S. prison population has grown exponentially, expanding from approximately 500,000 to 2.3 million people in just three decades. America now has the dubious distinction of leading the world in prison population: We account for 25 percent of all prisoners but only 5 percent of the global population. Our penchant for punishment has come at a cost. We spend almost $70 billion annually to place adults in prison and jails, to confine youth in detention centers, and to supervise 7.3 million individuals on probation and parole. Indeed, confinement costs have claimed an increasing share of state and local government spending. This trend has starved essential social programs -- most notably education.

Nearly 75 percent of imprisonment spending happens at the state level, where dollars are drawn from a general fund that is meant to pay for a range of public needs, including health care, housing, public assistance, and education. Whether we look back over the last two decades, or just the last two years, education, in particular, has become a casualty of state budget battles. Analysis by the National Association of State Budget Officers shows that elementary and high schools receive 73 percent of their state funding from this discretionary fund; colleges and universities count on the fund for half of their budgets. However, $9 out of every $10 that support imprisonment come from the same pot of money. With tens of billions of dollars in prison spending annually, states are finding that there is simply less discretionary money available to invest in education, especially in these lean economic times.

Indeed, as the economic downturn limited all state spending in the fiscal year 2008-2009, the share of general-fund money going to incarceration grew as expenditures in every other category -- -save public assistance -- declined. States still spend more of their general-fund dollars on education than on incarceration, but the percentage of dollars being used for incarceration is increasing, while the percentage for education is decreasing. In 33 of 50 states, corrections -- related costs made up a larger proportion of the general fund than in the previous fiscal year, while spending on K-12 and higher education decreased.

The federal stimulus, no doubt, helped states find money to pay for both prisons and other basic state services as tax revenue eroded. When future budget years arrive, however, and states and counties try to balance their books without the assistance of the federal stimulus, young people will experience more of the same: school closings, teacher layoffs, diminished after-school programs, and rising tuition at colleges and universities. All of this will happen while prison spending grows.

This tradeoff between education and incarceration is particularly acute at the community level. In many urban neighborhoods where millions of dollars are spent to lock up residents, the education infrastructure is crippled. As the prison population skyrocketed in the past three decades, researchers began to notice that high concentrations of inmates were coming from a few select neighborhoods -- primarily poor communities of color -- in major cities. These were dubbed "million -- dollar blocks" to reflect that spending on incarceration was the predominant public -- sector investment in these neighborhoods. NAACP research shows that matching zip codes to high rates of incarceration also reveals where low-performing schools, as measured by math proficiency, tend to cluster. The lowest-performing schools tend to be in the areas where incarceration rates are the highest. The following examples are instructive.

Los Angeles. California has the largest prison population in the country, with more than 170,000 individuals behind bars. In Los Angeles, more than half of current parolees live in neighborhoods that are home to less than 20 percent of the city's adult residents. More than a billion dollars are spent every year to incarcerate people from these communities. At the same time, as of spring 2010, the Los Angeles Unified School District was projecting a deficit of $640 million in the 2010-11 academic year. As a result, district officials were planning to raise class sizes and lay off thousands of teachers and other school-based staff.

How is school success affected by these policy choices and spending patterns? There is no definitive way to know what the previous spending cuts have meant for Los Angeles schools, but we do know that in Los Angeles, 67 percent of low-performing schools are in neighborhoods with the highest incarceration rates. By contrast, 68 percent of the city's high-performing schools are in neighborhoods with the lowest incarceration rates.

Philadelphia. In 2009, the School District of Philadelphia faced a projected budget shortfall of $147 million, after losing $160 million in state funding. Yet, during this same period, taxpayers spent nearly $290 million to imprison residents from just 11 Philadelphia neighborhoods, home to about one-quarter of the city's population.

As hundreds of millions of dollars are invested in incarcerating people from these select neighborhoods, the corresponding disinvestment in education in those neighborhoods is telling. Sixty-six percent of lower-performing schools are clustered in or very near neighborhoods with the highest rates of incarceration -- where the biggest taxpayer investment in imprisonment is being made. By contrast, 75 percent of Philadelphia's higher-performing schools are in neighborhoods with the lowest rates of incarceration.

Houston. In the 2009-2010 academic year, state budget cuts forced the Houston Independent School District to manage a projected $10 million shortfall. However, in the preceding year, Texas spent over $175 million to imprison residents from just 10 neighborhoods in Houston. In Houston, of the six schools deemed lower-performing, five are in neighborhoods with the highest rates of incarceration. By contrast, of the 12 schools considered higher-performing, eight are in neighborhoods with the lowest incarceration rates.

What we learn from Los Angeles, Houston, and Philadelphia is that our national priorities are misplaced, and with devastating consequences. In a few select neighborhoods, the heavy investment in incarceration over education correlates with the lowest-performing schools. These neighborhoods send more individuals to prison than to college -- reflecting the pattern of dollars invested. The relationship has not yet been shown to be causal, but we do see a correlative effect between education and incarceration. If states were to properly invest in reopening schools, keeping quality teachers, maintaining sensible classroom sizes, and sustaining the affordability of higher education, it's quite possible -- particularly for economic crimes like low-level drug dealing -- we would not need to imprison so many people and could stop sinking our valuable taxpayer dollars into an investment that has demonstrated scant return.

To shift our funding priorities, national and state policy-makers will have to choose cost-effective criminal-justice policies and focus on public-safety strategies that curb crime and reserve more of our tax dollars for our children's education. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California noted in his 2010 State of the State address: "Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future. ... What does it say about any state that focuses more on prison uniforms than on caps and gowns?" Only when we make meaningful investments in schools -- not prisons -- will our nation reap the benefits through increased earnings for families, reduced unemployment, increased tax revenues from more vibrant local economies, reduced reliance on public assistance, increased civic engagement, and improved public -- safety outcomes for neighborhoods at risk of violence and victimization.

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Since 1980, the U.S. prison population has grown exponentially, expanding from approximately 500,000 to 2.3 million people in just three decades. America now has the dubious distinction of leading the world in prison population: We account for 25 percent of all prisoners but only 5 percent of the global population.

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Contains some relevant chapters. -Chansorena

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Article about Discrimination of Ex-convicts 

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Article about Discrimination of Ex-convicts 

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E-book, some relevant chapters -Chansorena

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Article about incarceration and family.  

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Article about incarceration and family.  

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Relevant to inmates and their time effect on their families. May be helpful for our research. - Chansorena