Reentry in the News
Collected by Susan Mareneck, Director, ICARE
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A CHANCE FOR A CLEAN SLATE
Automatic expungement law has helped thousands clear arrest records
By James Drew
BALTIMORE SUN reporter
July 7, 2008
Thousands of Marylanders have had their arrest records removed from public view because of a new state law that requires automatic expungement for those who are detained and released without charge.
Proponents say the nine-month-old law is working as intended, removing potential barriers to obtaining employment, housing and loans. Another major change in state expungement law takes effect Oct. 1, when some criminal convictions in Maryland can be wiped out without a pardon from the governor.
The changes are seen as especially important in Baltimore City. Tens of thousands of residents, many of them young men, have minor criminal records - sometimes as a consequence of "zero-tolerance" policies that result in large numbers of arrests without charges or convictions.
But even the new laws don't go far enough, some advocates say. They want the legislature to help people with minor drug convictions - whom the new law would not directly benefit.
The law that took effect in October covers all crimes and has resulted in 7,092 automatic expungements through May 31. More than 6,000 originated in Baltimore, where most of the expungements have been triggered by police arresting people on suspicion of drug possession, failure to obey a police officer, loitering and alcohol violations - and then releasing them without charge after a review by prosecutors.
Previously, when prosecutors declined to bring charges, a person had to apply in writing, pay a $30 fee and waive his or her right to sue if the person didn't want to wait three years to expunge a criminal record. Many people did not take those steps.
"Before the law took effect, individuals would be arrested and released without charge and they would have no concept that it would show up on their criminal record," said Natalie Finegar, an assistant public defender. "And it would show up in a way that was very confusing ... with 'no disposition found.' So it would make it seem like there was an open, pending charge."
Expungement is growing in importance as the economy tightens, said Robert Guiney, president of Just Temps Personnel, a Baltimore-based industrial labor staffing company.
"Jobs are scarcer, and we see people taking a harder look at things like criminal records simply because there are more people trying to get a job. The nuisance charge has become more of an issue. With the economy booming, employers may overlook that," he said.
Maryland law bars employers from requiring disclosure of expunged criminal charges in an application or interview. A person's refusal to disclose information about criminal charges that have been expunged also may not be the sole reason for an employer to fire or refuse to hire that person, state law says.
Neil E. Duke, a Baltimore attorney who specializes in employment law, said job-seekers often have to make a judgment call, especially because many employers use companies that conduct background checks and that have computerized criminal records covering years before charges are expunged.
"A prospective employee can take two tacks," Duke said. One is to "explain the [charge] and the basis of expungement. A different mind-set is that expungement is a cleansing of the record and as such, there is no record anymore. There is no quote-unquote need to confess."
Some advocates say additional changes to state law are needed to help more people who demonstrate they want to change their lives.
Mark P. Matthews was among those who urged the legislature this year, without success, to allow those with minor drug convictions to get the records removed from public inspection after finishing treatment and job-preparedness training.
"Otherwise, we will tie the hands of hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals who have paid their debt, re-evaluated their priorities and are willing to become productive members of society,"' said Matthews, a Baltimore resident with a criminal record who conducts expungement seminars.
"Without a clean or 'cleaner' record, they are doomed to repeat past behaviors in order to survive economically," Matthews said.
Matthews has been trying to help Cris Keeling. At 29, Keeling has a long rap sheet and is trying to wipe out charges of attempted murder, arson and auto theft that prosecutors didn't pursue or that were dismissed.
"I'm trying to change my life. I need a job. I have four kids. It's about time for me to put some bacon on the table," said Keeling, who said he has spent about 15 years in jail. "Something has got to change."
The law that takes effect Oct. 1 allows for expungement of "nuisance crimes," including public urination, panhandling, drinking alcohol in a public place and riding mass transit without paying the fare. It also covers nuisance crime convictions before Oct. 1 this year, according to the state Department of Legislative Services, but it does not cover drug convictions.
Del. Samuel I. Rosenberg, a Baltimore Democrat, said he sponsored the measure at the request of the nonprofit Jobs Opportunities Task Force.
"These offenses are the most minor, ones rooted in homelessness, poverty and sometimes being in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Michael Pinard, a law professor at the University of Maryland. "Drink a beer in the Ravens stadium, it is fine. Drink a beer two blocks away, it is not fine."
But the state police and Baltimore City State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy told legislators that they opposed the bill, with the state police saying it would "allow those criminals who graduate to more harmful offenses, such as robbery, theft or assault, to avoid progressive penalties as their past disruptive behaviors may have been purged from the record."
Jessamy and then-Police Commissioner Leonard D. Hamm supported the automatic expungement bill sponsored in 2007 by Del. Keith E. Haynes, a Baltimore Democrat. Law enforcement agencies noted that they are allowed to keep expunged records for investigative purposes but are barred from releasing them to the public.
Unlike last year's law that covers those who are released without charge, those who are convicted of "nuisance crimes" are required to apply for expungement. They must wait for three years after the conviction or the sentence is completed.
Also, they aren't eligible if they have been convicted of a crime other than a minor traffic violation within three years of the conviction they're trying to expunge.
The state has estimated that about 96,000 people in Maryland have "nuisance crimes" on their records. Those crimes frequently are among several charges from the same incident, according to the Department of Legislative Services. The nuisance charge can't be wiped out unless all the other charges are eligible for expungement.
Despite the changes in expungement law, many who are trying to rebound from brushes with the law say they find it difficult to navigate the complex process.
At a recent seminar on expungement conducted by Matthews at the Prisoners Aid Association of Maryland, Kimberly M. Randall asked several questions.
Randall, 46, is trying to remove a drug possession charge from her record. According to the police report, officers arrested her July 21, 2006, after she bought a "white rocklike substance, suspected cocaine."
Her case ended with Baltimore prosecutors deciding not to pursue the charge. But Randall - who worked for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services for 15 years - said that after her arrest, she tested positive for drugs and lost her job.
Randall said she received treatment and has not used drugs for almost two years. She is doing janitorial work but wants to get the charge expunged so she can get a job in a parole or probation office.
"When people see 'possession' on your record, they prejudge you," she said.
james.drew@baltsun.com
Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun
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CountyNews
Vol. 40, No. 13 June 30, 2008
countynews_org
PROGRAM BRINGS COLLEGE STUDENTS AND INMATES TOGETHER
By Elizabeth Perry
STAFF WRITER
Mark Wachlin is a "non-traditional" student at Riverland Community College, in Owatonna, Minn., majoring in Human Services. He said he could relate to the inmates at Steele County Detention Center, because he was once an inmate himself.
Wachlin, 51, was in and out of jail at different times throughout his life for alcohol and drug-related arrests prior to his recovery in 1989. Despite a host of personal tragedies within eight months in 2004, he has maintained his sobriety for almost 20 years. He plans to become a chemical dependency counselor.
He went back to school a year ago and decided to take the Inside Out course on the advice of his academic advisor. He said he was interested in taking the course because he knew from firsthand experience that "not everyone who is in the system is a bad person, they've just made bad choices."
Inside Out brings college students majoring in human services and law enforcement together with inmates for a 17-week seminar class, which enables the students to see if theories learned in the classroom apply to what the inmates have learned from their own life experiences.
Steele County Commissioner Tom Shea said the Inside Out program was a good fit with the county jail's mission "to help prisoners change their lives and reduce the chances of recidivism. Most of the inmates are serving sentences of less than a year, or they were arrested but their cases have not gone to trial yet," Shea added.
"We want to give them some tools so that when they do get out they can be successful and not get into some of the same lifestyles and ruts that brought them there in the first place," Shea said.
He said the commitment and cooperation among the County Board, the college, the detention center and the Human Service Department is key to making the project work.
"All of us have separate interests or missions," Shea continued. "But here we were able to bring all these entities together and align them to implement a program that relied on each of these institutions."
Inside Out began as a pilot program between Temple University and the Philadelphia Prison System 11 years ago. Approximately 3,500 students and inmates have participated since 1997, and there are 20 states across the nation that have Inside Out partnerships between federal prisons and colleges and universities.
Kristin Klamm-Doneen, an ethics professor at Riverland, adapted the national program to fit the needs of the county facility. She presented the concept to county officials who were receptive to the idea. The program was approved last fall and had its first offering in January, with a for-credit course called Philosophy of Social Justice.
County Sheriff Gary Ringhofer had "questions and reservations" when the program was first presented to him, he told the Owatonna People's Press, but "right away thought it was unique."
Five Riverland Community College students and five inmates signed up for the class. Coursework involved reading criminal justice texts, writing papers, group discussions in class and two final group projects on institutionalization and designing a more successful re-entry program. The projects were presented to the jail administrator, the jail program coordinator, Steele County director of Human Services and a representative from Riverland Community College. Klamm-Doneen said all of the students in and outside of the jail were enthusiastic participants.
"One of the students, who was the youngest, seemed a little bit nervous the very first day," she said. "She's now doing an internship there at the jail and is assured now of her decision to do this as a career. I saw a lot of growth in her assertiveness and leadership skills."
The inmates who signed up for the class were a dedicated group and included two men who audited the course after two other inmates left.
"One big thing I got out of it was how we could possibly take the low-risk offender[s] out of the prison system and put them in programs to help assist them and empower them with the knowledge to believe in themselves," said Wachlin, the former inmate. "To [help them] to go back out and do whatever it takes to become a productive member of society, rather than a statistic."
Another incarcerated student, Matthew Michels, 27, was released half-way through the class, but he returned to the jail as an outside student to complete the course. He told the People's Press he always wanted to continue his education, and eventually go to film school or pursue a career in social work or human resources.
"I know what a big opportunity education is for me," he said. "It was a wonderful opportunity for me to express my views on things and really have them heard."
He said coming back to jail for classes after he was released felt a bit strange at first.
"When I was incarcerated, I would kind of look forward to going to every week," he said. "When I got out I still looked forward to going to class, but I was a little uneasy coming back into the jail where I'd spent my time."
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NY TIMES, June 28, 2008
On Religion
UNLIKELY ALLIES ON A FORMER WEDGE ISSUE
By Samuel G. Freedman
During his years as the attorney general of Virginia, Mark Earley periodically visited his state's prisons. In a very real way, he was looking at the human consequences of his career as a public servant, the men and women jailed for fixed, lengthy sentences without parole under laws Mr. Earley had endorsed. Not surprisingly, many inmates pulled back a few steps when introduced to their visitor.
Eventually, though, Mr. Earley took their measure. What he discovered, he recalled in a recent interview, were "not the Ted Bundys, the mass murderers" but "kids who reminded me of my kids, serving 5, 10, 15 years for drugs and going out and being rearrested again."
In those moments of recognition, Mr. Earley began a startling transformation from a tough-on-crime crusader to an advocate for prison reform and a prominent critic of the very type of drug laws he had formerly promoted. Since leaving the attorney's general's position in 2001, Mr. Earley has taken his new cause to a position as president of Prison Fellowship Ministries, a national organization based in the Washington suburbs.
Motivated both by religious faith and a secular analysis of public policy, Mr. Earley and the fellowship's vice president, Pat Nolan, a former California legislator, have regularly testified before Congress, written op-ed essays and given speeches on behalf of efforts to roll back mandatory-minimum sentencing, equalize penalties for crack and powder cocaine, and offer nonviolent offenders treatment rather than incarceration, among other initiatives.
On the surface a redoubt of the religious right, firmly rooted in evangelical Christianity and conservative politics, the Prison Fellowship Ministries' liberal position on such issues underscores the increasing irrelevance of such rigid categories.
The group's role in criminal justice bears similarity to the stance taken by evangelical leaders like Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church in Southern California, on global warming, AIDS prevention and Third World poverty.
"What's distinct is that we're in an 'Aha!' moment now," Mr. Earley, 53, said in a phone conversation. "The crime issue used to be such a driving wedge between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and now it's not. In the presidential campaign this year, when have you heard crime as a wedge issue? It's a common-ground issue, and no one would have envisioned that in the '70s and '80s."
Indeed, an earlier, opposite version of bipartisanship during the 1990s led to the proliferation of severe antidrug laws and a boom in prison construction. President Bill Clinton in 1994 introduced a $30 billion anticrime bill, a main element in his effort to move the Democratic Party toward the center, if not the right, on the law-and-order issue.
To whatever degree the pendulum has now swung toward second thoughts about drug laws, the efforts of a group like Prison Ministry Fellowship have been both a cause and an effect.
What is indisputable is that those efforts have made for an unexpected coalition. While heading into the Capitol one day last year, Mr. Nolan recalled, he was spontaneously embraced and called Baby by Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat, who had been his political antagonist when both served in the California Legislature.
"What the Prison Fellowship brings to the discussion is a different approach, a different perspective, that says this is not a liberal-versus-conservative debate," said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a group based in Washington, D.C. "This is about what is effective policy and compassionate policy."
Last year the prison-reform movement won Congressional passage of the Second Chance Act, which supports job training, education and other services for prisoners being released. Also in 2007, the federal Sentencing Commission amended its guidelines to stop penalizing crimes involving crack more severely than those involving powder cocaine. The governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, a Republican, reversed the state's lifetime ban on voting by felons.
What brought Mr. Earley and Mr. Nolan into the debate was a mix of factors. Before their arrival, Prison Fellowship Ministries ? founded by Charles Colson after he served a prison sentence for his role in the Watergate scandal ? had already staked out reformist positions on prison rape and prisoner rehabilitation. Mr. Earley referred to his political evolution as "an attitude-adjustment by God." Mr. Nolan, 58, experienced his own road-to-Damascus moment while serving a two-year prison sentence in the mid-1990s on a corruption charge.
"I went into prison believing in God, and I came out knowing him," he said. "I understood how much he loved us, even in a dark place."
Practical reasoning coincided with revelation. Nationally, Mr. Earley had seen the population of state and federal prisons triple to 1.5 million over 20 years, and spending on corrections increase by 125 percent. The result, he came to believe, was that "the people we sent to jail were coming out without rehabilitation, without drug treatment, more bitter and more antisocial than they went in."
Not every precinct of the religious right has been persuaded. Julie Stewart, president of the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, said her organization had been repeatedly rebuffed by Focus on the Family, the influential and powerful group led by the Rev. James Dobson. Still, the drug war's dissidents now clearly exist on both sides of the partisan and ideological divide.
"In a way, that's a religious experience, too," Mr. Nolan said of the unlikely alliance. "Doesn't the Bible tell us the lion and lamb should lie down together?"
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The New York Times
May 20, 2008
Editorial
A SECOND CHANCE
With prison costs soaring, many states are understandably desperate for ways to cut recidivism and increase the chances that newly released prisoners build viable lives. The Second Chance Act, signed into law by President Bush last month, would galvanize the re-entry effort, providing the states with money and guidance. Now Congress must appropriate the promised dollars.
Some states are already leading the way. In Illinois, where the inmate population has doubled since the late 1980s, Gov. Rod Blagojevich has begun a promising re-entry program that could become a national model. The comprehensive plan includes drug treatment, job training and placement and a variety of community-based initiatives designed to help newly released inmates forge successful post-prison lives.
Illinois is also revamping its parole system by hiring more parole officers and changing regulations so that parolees who commit lesser violations are dealt with in their community -- with counseling, drug treatment or more vigilant monitoring -- rather than being reflexively sent back to prison. The state is working with Chicago's Safer Foundation to provide job training and placement for people just out of prison.
Parole-based reforms are also proving effective in Texas and Kansas. Both states have expanded drug treatment and other services and have seen a drop in parole revocations. Therapeutic programs that help ex-offenders reconnect with their families -- while providing them with medical and mental health care -- are also important.
A fully funded Second Chance Act would help other states develop their own much-needed re-entry programs. The $330 million cost is a small price to pay to reduce prison populations and give more ex-offenders a better chance to make it on the outside.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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The New York Times
May 17, 2008
NEW TACK ON STRAYING PAROLEES OFFERS A HAND INSTEAD OF CUFFS
By ERIK ECKHOLM
WICHITA, Kan. ? Since his release in January after serving time for a 2006 theft conviction, Lonnie Kemp has violated his parole conditions several times, getting drunk and kicked out of a halfway house and showing traces of marijuana in urine tests. If this were a few years ago, he almost certainly would be back in prison.
Similar parole violations after a previous theft conviction, in 1988, had repeatedly landed him back inside. In those days, parole was enforced with a spirit that officials recall, only half-jokingly, as ?trail ?em, nail ?em, jail ?em,? overfilling the prisons but doing little to rehabilitate offenders.
Today, Kansas is a leader in a spreading national effort to make parole more effective and useful ? to reduce violations and reincarcerations as it protects the public and seeks to help more offenders go straight. Mr. Kemp?s parole officer is keeping close tabs on him, but instead of sending him for a punitive stretch behind bars, he required Mr. Kemp to attend a substance-abuse program, made sure he had a stable home with a relative and helped him get a job with a construction company.
A similar transformation of the parole system has begun in several states including Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York and Texas. It has been prompted in part by financial concerns: more than one-third of all prison admissions are for parole violations, helping to drive an unsustainable surge in prison-building.
It has also been driven by evidence that conventional parole supervision is often a waste of resources. "If we sent him back to prison for 90 days, he'd have to start all over with his life again," Kent Sisson, parole director for southern Kansas, said of Mr. Kemp. "Instead, he's working, paying child support and getting a G.E.D."
Mr. Kemp, 51, said: "Before, you didn't want to have parole officers around, they'd send you back for almost anything. This time, I have positive people around me and I can call my parole officer any time."
An influential study in 2005 by the Urban Institute concluded that parole supervision had little effect on the rate at which ex-prisoners were re-arrested.
"Parole is a system set up to find failure," said Michael Jacobson, president of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York and a former chief of corrections and probation for the city. "If what you're interested in is finding failure and putting people back in prison, it's like shooting fish in a barrel."
"But it doesn't work in terms of public safety or public spending," said Mr. Jacobson, who praised Kansas as a pioneer in reforms.
As part of a get-tough spirit, a number of states in recent decades adopted mandatory sentences and ended the historic discretion of parole boards over release dates. Yet every state still has post-release supervision for most offenders, averaging three years with stiff conditions like not consuming alcohol, having urine tests, abiding by curfews, holding a job and meeting regularly with a parole officer.
The most widespread change is the use of risk assessments that help officials concentrate on those deemed most likely to commit new crimes. Those seen as low risk are only loosely supervised, perhaps even allowed to just send in status reports by mail.
"Half the offenders will do fine without any supervision," Mr. Sisson said. "We're trying to better understand who are the 50 percent most likely to commit more crimes, and how we can prevent that."
The reformers are seeking a deeper change in attitude as well. "We've rewritten all our job descriptions," said Roger Werholtz, the Kansas secretary of corrections. "The idea is to work with offenders to prevent them from violating their conditions of release, rather than just monitoring them to see if violations occur."
In a sharp break with tradition, here and in some other states, parole agencies are hiring officers with backgrounds in social work rather than law enforcement. Parole officers are partnering with re-entry case workers who help prepare prisoners for society with group therapy and housing and job assistance. They start meeting prisoners well before their release, visit their families and may even drive them to a job interview.
"We now talk about reducing the barriers to success," said Mr. Sisson, who works closely with the county re-entry director, Sally Frey.
In Kansas, parolees who threaten violence or openly defy the rules are still put back in prison, and those who commit new crimes are put on trial. But for those with lesser lapses, like Mr. Kemp, officials try to judge whether reincarceration will be useful and may rely instead on a combination of help, closer supervision and graduated sanctions.
Those seen as on the edge are required to report six evenings a week to a day reporting center, where they attend group therapy meetings designed to make them examine their motives and goals. They are often required to wear G.P.S. ankle bracelets that record their movements and flag violations, like not being home at curfew or, for a sex offender, going too near a school.
The changes, introduced over the last few years, are having measurable success, Mr. Werholtz said.
In Kansas in 2003, he said, an average of 203 parolees were returned to prison each month. By last year the number dropped to 103 a month. This could simply mean that those violating parole were left unpunished. But the number of convictions for new crimes by parolees has also declined; in the late 1990s, the number of people on parole with new convictions averaged 424 a year; in the last three years, it was down to 280 despite greater overall numbers under supervision.
"I think the data pretty well establish that not only are we keeping people out of prison at a better rate but that the amount of criminal activity they are inflicting on the public has also declined," Mr. Werholtz said. The state has also been able to put off costly prison construction plans, he said.
For inmates seen as high-risk, the re-entry team starts meeting them as early as 18 months before their release, often getting them into therapy groups and starting schooling or job training. The parole officers may join in about six months prior to release.
At the Winfield Correctional Facility, Mike Lentz, a parole officer who deals with gang-connected offenders, recently joined a re-entry case worker, Brianna Morphis, and a police liaison and a substance abuse specialist for Mr. Lentz's first meeting with prisoners he would later supervise.
One of them, Raphael Frazier, 27, has about four months left to serve on a forgery conviction before starting parole. After being sent to prison in 1999 for aggravated robbery, Mr. Frazier was released on parole in 2003 but re-imprisoned in 2004 for three months for absconding, or failure to report.
In 2005 he was convicted on a new charge of forgery. This time he had more help, including group therapy and technical training in airplane building that should land him a good job with one of the aircraft companies clustered around Wichita. "It makes it easier knowing that people are out to help you, instead of driving a stake in your back every time you turn around," Mr. Frazier said. "I changed my attitude."
Another innovation is accountability panels, which are groups of community volunteers, including former inmates, pastors and others who meet with newly released offenders to offer encouragement and meet them later to discuss problems or, ideally, congratulate them for completing parole. Panelists try to be encouraging and helpful.
Lorlei Sontag, 37, who has struggled with crack addiction, recently met her panel when she finally completed drug treatment after failed efforts. She told of going to the dentist and seeing a familiar crack house through the window. "My stomach was doing flips, but I didn't go," she said. As the group applauded her progress, one panelist said she knew of a different dentist Ms. Sontag could see in a less tempting location.
At Wichita's day reporting center, Shontell J., 31, described his three months wearing a G.P.S.-monitor ankle bracelet: "It's irritating as hell, you can feel it's always there."
Convicted when he was 17 for aggravated battery, he spent twelve and a half years in prison and has a large scar on his cheek from a prison fight. He started a roofing job while still in prison and has kept it for three years, and he has adopted his girlfriend's two children.
But he has also had serious parole violations that put him under house arrest three times and then on daily reporting, with G.P.S. surveillance. Once he drove to Topeka, beyond the permitted 50-mile limit, and got caught when he was stopped for a traffic violation. He was arrested in a bar fight in another town and he failed a urine test. Now, still reporting most days but no longer wearing the ankle bracelet, he said: "I tell myself a thousand times, I will not get into trouble."
Mr. Kemp's violations did not result in an ankle bracelet, but Mr. Lentz, his parole officer, said that in the past he still would have sent him back for a prison stay. In the new spirit, though, Mr. Lentz noted that "none of his actions are so heinous or hurtful to the community."
Mr. Kemp works from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. each day, assembling lumber for a company that makes trusses for houses. Initially he is making just $6.50 an hour " "not much, but it pays the bills," he said " but he is in line for a permanent position and a raise.
"Things are going real smooth now," he said.
He has one son who is 29 and another who is 14 and living with a relative.
"When I get myself together, I want my two boys to come live with me," Mr. Kemp said. "I want to be a father."
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
"COMMUNITY" TAKES ROOT WITHIN PRISON WALLS
By F.A. Krift
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, May 12, 2008
The old block of the state prison in Woods Run smells of urine. Prisoners live two to a cell, in cells stacked five tiers high.
A short walk across the yard, prisoners in a treatment program live isolated from those general population inmates in orderly pods. They have work tables to make motivational posters that hang on walls. One poster urges cleanliness with a hand-colored picture of a yellow rubber ducky.
After closing the 126-year-old prison along the Ohio River for two years, the state reopened it in 2007, and a portion is being used to rehabilitate drug- and alcohol-addicted inmates who committed crimes related to their substance abuse. New Jersey-based Community Education Centers runs four therapeutic communities for 183 inmates separated from the 800 general population prisoners, some of whom are serving life sentences.
The prisoners in the addiction program start their day with morning stretches and by reading inspirational messages before spending up to five hours in therapy sessions and other meetings.
This program started in December at the North Side prison and is considered a success, said Becky Chambers, community manager at SCI-Pittsburgh.
But a prison drug therapy expert said new therapeutic communities are prone to failure.
"No one challenges the model, if it's instituted right," said Harry K. Wexler, a New York-based researcher with the National Development & Research Institutes. "If it isn't, then you have a problem, and it may not go well."
Prison rehab in these "community" settings teaches general skills, said Melissa Weglarz, Community Education Centers' in-prison treatment state director. It involves not only intensive group therapy but also basic etiquette, such as properly introducing yourself to a stranger.
"They're coming out," Chambers said of the inmates, some of whom are doing extra time for violating parole on an earlier offense. "Wouldn't you want them to get the skills they need""
Yes, said Rich Foster, corrections division director at Gateway Rehabilitation Center, but they need more treatment upon release.
"It's very useful to get services while they are incarcerated, but it's important for us to pick up where the therapeutic communities leave off," Foster said.
Building the therapeutic community takes time, said Wexler, who is not affiliated with the Pennsylvania treatment programs. If the programs don't respond to recommendations for improvement, as happened in California for 18 years, they'll be criticized and unsuccessful, Wexler said.
California's inspector general in February 2007 blamed treatment programs for wasting $1 billion and faulted the state's management for not responding to research recommendations to improve. A University of California-Los Angeles study concluded the programs imitated therapeutic communities "in name only," the inspector general's report said, and didn't reduce recidivism rates.
"Basically, it was a billion-dollar bust," Chief Deputy Inspector General Brett H. Morgan said. "They blew it."
Pennsylvania has used therapeutic communities in prisons for more than 10 years, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Susan McNaughton said. It has 1,952 therapeutic community beds at 27 institutions. The state spent $32.6 million last year on drug and alcohol treatment, according to department figures, treating 12,723 of 42,960 prisoners for addictions.
A 2006 Temple University study showed therapeutic communities reduced Pennsylvania inmate recidivism rates by 11 percent.
The inmates must interact and support one another, as they would in addiction support groups outside of prison, Weglarz said. They keep clean cells, a clean common area and follow established house rules, or they will be kicked out.
They face extended sentences if they don't complete the program, SCI-Pittsburgh spokeswoman Carol Scire said. That matters, she said, because these inmates are near their release dates.
The mood is different in the Woods Run therapeutic communities, said Thomas Dillingham, a correctional officer at the prison since 1992. Stationed in a therapeutic community, he feels like he's helping inmates recover and not just guarding them.
"A lot of people don't know," Dillingham said, "this is the other side of corrections."
F.A. Krift can be reached at bkrift@tribweb.com or 412-380-5644.
Images and text copyright © 2008 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co.
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The New York Times
May 6, 2008
REPORTS FIND RACIAL GAP IN DRUG ARRESTS
By ERIK ECKHOLM
More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.
Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.
But they note that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the 1980s, which spawned the war on drugs, has largely subsided, reducing the rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system among many blacks.
In 2006, according to federal data, drug-related arrests climbed to 1.89 million, up from 1.85 million in 2005 and 581,000 in 1980.
More than four in five of the arrests were for possession of banned substances, rather than for their sale or manufacture. Four in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, according to the latest F.B.I. data.
Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the lives of black men: they are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, according to the Human Rights Watch report.
Others are arrested for possession of small quantities of drugs and later released, but with a permanent blot on their records anyway.
"The way the war on drugs has been pursued is one of the biggest reasons for the growing racial disparities in criminal justice over all," said Ryan S. King, a policy analyst with the Sentencing Project who wrote its report, which focuses on the differential in arrest rates, not only between races but also among cities around the country. Some cities pursue urban, minority drug use far more intensively than do others.
Both Democratic presidential candidates, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, have strongly condemned the racial disparities in arrests and incarceration during their campaigns, although neither has said how they would end them.
Two-thirds of those arrested for drug violations in 2006 were white and 33 percent were black, although blacks made up 12.8 percent of the population, F.B.I. data show. National data are not collected on ethnicity, and arrests of Hispanics may be in either category.
"The race question is so entangled in the way the drug war was conceived," said Jamie Fellner, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch and the author of its report.
"If the drug issue is still seen as primarily a problem of the black inner city, then we'll continue to see this enormously disparate impact," Ms. Fellner said.
Her report cites federal data from 2003, the most recent available on this aspect, indicating that blacks constituted 53.5 percent of all who entered prison for a drug conviction.
Some crime experts say that the disparities exist for sound reasons. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, said it made sense for police to focus more on fighting visible drug dealing in low-income urban areas, largely involving members of minorities, than on hidden use in suburban homes, more often by whites, because the urban street trade is more associated with violence and other crimes and impairs the quality of life.
"The disparities reflect policing decisions to use drug laws to try and reduce violence and to respond to the demand by law-abiding residents in poor neighborhoods to clean up the drug trade," Ms. Mac Donald said.
But what people in low-income urban areas need is not more incarceration but improved public safety, Mr. King said. "Arresting hundreds of thousands of young African-American men hasn't ended street-corner drug sales."
A shift of resources toward drug treatment and social services rather than wholesale incarceration, he said, would do more to improve conditions in blighted neighborhoods.
Limited efforts have been made to shift policies in ways that may reduce racial differences. Many states are experimenting with so-called drug courts, which send users to treatment rather than prison. This does not, however, affect arrest rates, which have lifelong consequences even for those who are never convicted or imprisoned.
Police in a few cities including Denver, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have said they are spending fewer resources on arrests for lower-lever offenses like marijuana possession.
In December, the United States Sentencing Commission amended the federal sentencing guidelines for convictions involving crack cocaine, which is more often used by blacks, somewhat reducing the length of sentences compared with those for convictions involving powder cocaine. But mandatory and longer sentences for crack violations remain embedded in federal and state laws.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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The New York Times
April 22, 2008
Editorial
Crime and Punishment in Connecticut
Two horrifying crimes have exposed serious weaknesses in Connecticut's criminal justice system. But a "three strikes and you're out" law proposed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell and Republicans in the Legislature would do more harm than good.
Last July two recently paroled men broke into a home in Cheshire and tortured and murdered three people. Last month a man who served more than eight years for assaulting a 5-year-old — and had been out on probation for less than a month — broke into a New Britain home. He accosted two women, wounding one and killing the other.
Republicans, led by Ms. Rell, have responded by calling for a "three strikes" law. Democrats have rightly resisted. The proposed law, which would mandate life in prison for anyone convicted of three violent felonies, is a bumper-sticker solution that would create injustices by barring judges' discretion in sentencing. It would also not deter the many crimes committed by people who have not committed three violent felonies.
Governor Rell and the Democrats do agree on the need for other urgent reforms, including more re-entry programs and jobs training and better monitoring after prisoners are released on probation and parole. Connecticut has 2,500 parolees, but a staggering 55,000 people on probation. Probation officers handle an average of 107 cases each — far too many.
Connecticut's system for sharing crime information, which could keep some of the most dangerous offenders off the streets, is antiquated. It has neither inpatient treatment for sex offenders nor housing for them once they are released. Hundreds of former inmates are on a waiting list for inpatient drug treatment.
The suspect arrested in the New Britain case had been staying in a homeless shelter at night but roaming freely during the day while waiting to begin outpatient sex offender treatment. Returning released inmates to society with so little support makes no sense.
Unfortunately, Republicans in the Legislature are interested only in forcing a vote on the three-strikes law. That overlooks far bigger problems and is no way to make Connecticut safer.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
By Wendy A. Hoke | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor from the April 21, 2008 edition
HE SERVED TIME; CAN HE SERVE ON THE CLEVELAND CITY COUNCIL?
John A. Boyd feels his rehabilitation makes him a model of hope for those struggling as he did.
Cleveland - Cleveland's Ward 6 encompasses the sprawling campus of the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic, and the cultural riches of the Cleveland Play House, Museum of Contemporary Art, Karamu House, and Little Italy. But it is also one of the city's poorest areas with boarded up homes and businesses amid storefront churches and convenience stores, a striking canvas of today's economic woes.
Many Ward 6 residents have been touched by the prison system – including John Boyd, who has spent half of his adult life incarcerated for murder, forgery, theft, and drug trafficking.
He's not so different from many others in his neighborhood, except that he believes his life is a testimony to rehabilitation.
"It's never too late to be what you might've been," says the tall, calm, social worker. He's so convinced of his ability to change people's perceptions that he's hoping to be elected the ward's city councilman in the April 22 special election.
Boyd's story is one of redemption, but not the easy kind that washes everyone clean on a Sunday morning. It's more complex, playing on society's deepest fears about the true nature of forgiveness. As a result, his hope for a future of public service is held hostage by community unease over his past.
Talk shows and bloggers are vociferously critical, saying it's a big stretch for a convicted murderer to win a council seat that pays $70,000 per year. Others say that if residents vote for him, they deserve what they get.
But Boyd wants people to see him as a rehabilitated man, someone worthy of a second chance, of public service.
Whether a convicted felon can hold office isn't clear, but in that debate, Ohio's attorney general has indicated that the law is vague in addressing a convicted felon holding office.
Regardless of that open question, Boyd is running against Mamie Mitchell, a former Cuyahoga County assistant prosecutor. Ms. Mitchell holds the position on an interim basis and enjoys the endorsement of key city leaders, including council president Martin J. Sweeney.
Despite the long odds, Boyd supporters are optimistic. "A lot of people support him because he can relate to people. If people listen to him, he's got 'em," says Frances Caldwell, his campaign treasurer.
And Boyd feels voters recognize that he hears them and cares: "One of the key features of living in oppressed conditions is the assassination of all hope. Prison was like that, but so are the conditions here. Residents in Ward 6 need hope."
• • •
Boyd knows that, just like first impressions of the ward itself, he is more than he seems.
His freshly painted, tidily landscaped home on East 84th Street is one of the nicest in this neighborhood of boarded-up houses and vacant lots. That blight is one reason he's running.
"I was born and raised in this house," he says. "This neighborhood is no reflection of what it was in my childhood. It was a middle-class neighborhood. We would sleep on the front porch in the summertime and leave the doors open year-round."
But his close-knit world was a predominately female one comprised of his great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and two aunts. Young Boyd had no relationship with his father.
"A woman cannot teach a child how to become a man. So a boy will start looking to other men ... for role models," he says.
Like many other inner-city neighborhoods, Boyd's was not short on colorful characters. "There was a lot of hustling going on. Like a lot of young men without fathers we would gravitate toward the guys with the big shiny cars and the pretty women," he says.
His fate took a turn when he and his friends decided to rob a "numbers house," where illegal gambling took place.
"We didn't go there with the intent to hurt anyone," Boyd explains. "But there was a struggle between me and the owner over a gun. It went off.... We left, and I had no knowledge the other guy had died.
"It was an accident. But I accept the responsibility that as a result of my being there a life was lost," he says.
At age 16, Boyd pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He served eight years in the Ohio Penitentiary. When he entered prison, Boyd could barely read or write. "My mom made me promise I would go to school." And, indeed, he earned a high school diploma, associate's degrees in business management and social science, and a bachelor's degree in psychology.
Released from his first prison term in 1980, when he was 23, Boyd struggled to fit in.
"I thought I was an adult now, not a child. Man, was I naive. I was labeled as a convicted murderer and couldn't get a job. I would never even get the interview because they'd read my past conviction on my application. [If I] left it off, employers would find out and I'd get fired.
"What do you do when you can't get a job? You go back to what you were doing that landed you in prison in the first place."
His incarceration for theft and forgery in 1992, would be his last: "I realized I needed to get a grip." He didn't want his daughter Amira, then 4, growing up without him.
Faith, absent in much of his adult life, suddenly became a positive force, he says. "I don't wear it on my sleeve, but the fact of the matter is it turned my life around."
Now, to attract voters, he's using all that he's learned about service to others, the problems of absentee fathers, creating opportunities, and commitment to his community.
Recently he visited a senior center. "You could feel the animosity in the room," says Ms. Caldwell. The first questions were about his record. He asked for a show of hands of people who knew someone who'd been incarcerated. "Nearly every hand went up," she says. He asked them to give him the chance they'd offer their loved ones. "By the end they didn't want him to go."
One influential local politician, Cuyahoga County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones, is complimentary if careful: "Regardless of whether or not I agree with him on specific issues, John's candidacy is a valuable social service in that it heightens our awareness of the barriers to seeking a second chance confronted by ex-offenders." Boyd has worked on Jones's previous campaigns.
Although Boyd didn't receive The Plain Dealer's endorsement, the paper's editorial board did note April 17 that, "Boyd could continue to make a big difference.... He offers a living example of hope to the young people in one of Cleveland's poorest wards."
Boyd was pleasantly surprised by those words, but recognizes the obstacles ahead: "... my city council race is about the larger issue of being marginalized. We pay a lot of lip service to forgiveness, but do we really believe in it?"
He's tenacious in creating opportunities for himself. He works with at-risk youth, assisting with job training, life skills, and counseling as a licensed social worker assistant. But when he was denied licensure as a social worker because of his felony convictions, he stood before the state licensing board to argue his case and won.
• • •
Can a convicted murderer deliver hope? Unequivocally yes, says Boyd, admitting, though, that he tests people's faith and that makes them uncomfortable.
You can't forgive someone halfway, he says: "The Bible is filled with folks who are on the wrong side until God came into their lives. If you say you believe in the power of God to change men's lives, then you've got to believe fully."
His victory, he adds, would be for formerly incarcerated people. "It's larger than John Boyd."
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The New York Times
April 7, 2008
Citywide
With an Ex-Inmate's Help, Returning to Life Outside
By DAVID GONZALEZ
Mark Graham sat inside the low-ceilinged ground floor of a narrow Brooklyn row house. The room was plain, and his mood was calm as he reflected on a favorite Bible verse.
"Seek the shalom of the city into which I have sent you into exile," he recited, from the Book of Jeremiah. He spread his arms and looked about. There was little to behold. But it was peaceful.
The first time he heard that verse, he was in exile, inside Sing Sing prison, serving 20 years to life for murder. He had not even turned 17 when he shot and killed a man in 1979, during a street robbery gone wrong. He admits to having grown up in group homes and prison, eventually finishing high school and college behind bars. While at Sing Sing, he earned a master's degree in professional studies offered by New York Theological Seminary.
He now presides over a small village in exile, the Redemption Center in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, where 17 recently released men and women are trying to find their way back into the world they left — sometimes decades ago — because of crime and drugs. It is a shoestring operation, and a frayed one at that. But it beats where they came from. Here, they have a bed, rules, support and a chance to find training or a job.
"What does shalom mean," he said. "How do you find it in those depraved conditions of prison? How do we seek prosperity in this place now? We are people who exist in this land that is foreign to us."
With the American prison population at its highest ever, there are increased calls to help ex-offenders ease back into their communities. Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has written on the topic and presided last week over a conference that addressed the issue.
"We have quintupled the per capita rate of incarceration over the last 30 years," he said. "Many more people are coming back to a small number of communities and facing all these challenges. A very big one is housing."
Mr. Graham, 45, still remembers his first crime. He was 12 years old and had recently moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant from East New York, Brooklyn. A neighborhood teenager named Theodore told him he knew how to make fast money. "He showed me a building where a bike was in the hallway," Mr. Graham said. "I held the door open and he rushed it out. He sold it and gave me $30."
Before long, he was taking the train to 14th Street in Manhattan and shoplifting like a champ. He would sell what he stole for easy money back in his neighborhood. He learned to drink beer and smoke pot.
He also learned that his mother refused to put up with his nonsense. She allowed the courts to send him to group homes, which were, to him, like finishing school for felons.
"We had all these guys from different boroughs who committed different offenses," he said. "We'd share stories and compliment each other on the lies we told."
He had been out mere months when he went on a robbery spree in the fall of 1979. He and two friends accosted a stranger. Mr. Graham held the gun. The stranger tried to yank it away. A shot rang out and the man, Ivan Porter, was mortally wounded.
A year later, Mr. Graham was serving 20 years to life. He said the first three years whizzed by. Then he realized that people can actually spend a lifetime behind bars. That was when he got serious about going back to school (and devouring the library's law books for a series of appeals that proved to be unsuccessful).
Even during his seminary studies, he said, he had little remorse for what he had done. It was only in 1997 that the depth of his crime hit him. He was watching a movie about a drunken driver involved in a fatal accident, who realized he should have never been behind the wheel of a car.
"If I never had a weapon in my hand, this would not have happened," he said. "That was when the healing began. I had to take responsibility for what I had done. I decided I would dedicate my life to the memory of Mr. Porter. I carry this man with me every day in my heart."
When he was released on October 17, 2001, he looked up Julio Medina, a seminary classmate who had lived in the cell next to his at Sing Sing. Mr. Medina runs Exodus Transitional Community, a respected faith-based program that helps ex-offenders adjust to life outside. Mr. Graham spent four years as a case manager there, until he realized how hard it was for his clients to find housing. Through a series of lucky breaks and the help of his fiancée, he found a beat-up row house in foreclosure. A benefactor helped with money, and friends from prison helped with sweat. Last July, he welcomed the first residents, who help defray costs with their $215 monthly housing payments from public assistance.
He has not gone wanting for clients.
"I was expecting a shelter before I got here," said Shaun Booker, 29, who spent two years in prison for assaulting a court officer. "When I got here, it was different. There is warmth here."
The 17 men and women reside separately on the upper floors of the row house, and on the top floor of the house next door. The rooms have beds with real mattresses, a nightstand and not much else. The rooms are clean, if cramped. Windowsills are pressed into service to store everything from Bibles and driver's manuals to medicine and condoms.
Residents have to be out working or in training programs from 9 until 3. They must all be back home alone by 9. Video cameras monitor all stairways and doors.
Of the 58 clients who have passed through, 11 have been asked to leave for violating the rules, Mr. Graham said. One man, he said, is back in prison. Many have managed to find homes outside.
"Mark gives you a place that shows you how to get back in step," said Lavon Turner, who arrived in January after serving more than four years for attempted robbery. "You're not in a house where your family is giving you everything. Here they are helping you. They are your backbone. But at the end of the day, you have to be a stand-up dude. If you are still here after months, it defeats the purpose of this place. That's not independent living."
It's enough to make them feel like big shots. Maybe too big, said Jose Caban, a case manager at the center who briefly lived at the center when he got out of prison in January.
"In institutions, the ceilings are 20 feet high," he said. "Everything is big. When you come into one of these rooms in the center, it's so small. You feel like a giant. It took me two weeks to feel normal again."
With almost seven years on the outside, Mr. Graham feels more or less normal, if harried. He intends to spend less time at the center and more time fund-raising and speaking in public, since he refuses to see the center close. He talks at least once a week with Mr. Medina, who offers him financial and administrative advice. Mr. Medina, who has received much praise for his work, is enthusiastic about his former prison friend.
"He went out and did it, even if he operates at a deficit," Mr. Medina said. "We ain't professionals, but we use our passion to help. Through our own wounds, we are able to go out and heal others."
Mr. Graham is grateful for his friend's help and encouragement.
"Of course he might be biased," Mr. Graham admitted. "We were handcuffed together."
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The New York Times
April 12, 2008
Editorial
Seeking Redemption After Prison
The compassion and bipartisanship that President Bush promised in the 2000 election campaign made a long-awaited appearance this week as he signed a law to help prisoners re-enter society. The Second Chance Act, five years in the making, is a welcome relief from the simplistic lock-'em-up posture of recent decades that has the United States leading the world in incarceration. It is an important start, but more still needs to be done.
Close to 1.6 million Americans are in prison, a figure that does not count the more than 700,000 people held in local jails. While 650,000 prisoners are released each year, an estimated two-thirds of them can expect to return to prison within three years. Little help is extended for newly released prisoners making this unpromising transition, particularly compared with society's mammoth investment in building more prisons.
The failure to integrate former prisoners into society is bad for them and for society, since it leads to more crime. The new law offers grants to state and local governments and nonprofit groups specializing in housing, health and employment for ex-prisoners. It emphasizes vocational training, individual mentoring and better drug treatment. And it calls for pilot programs for elderly nonviolent offenders, who cost more than $20,000 a year to keep in prison, as well as alternatives to jail for parents convicted of nonviolent crimes.
The $326 million that the law promises has yet to be appropriated. Congress should quickly allocate the money as a down payment on a goal that Mr. Bush described as redemption, as he alluded to his own past struggle against alcoholism.
The Second Chance Act should be the start of a new, more enlightened approach to criminal justice. The obvious next step is for the administration to retreat from its support for unduly harsh prison sentences, which are enormously expensive — and leave the criminal justice system with too few resources to do the sort of rehabilitative work the new law wisely
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The New York Times
March 10, 2008
Editorial
Prison Nation
After three decades of explosive growth, the nation's prison population has reached some grim milestones: More than 1 in 100 American adults are behind bars. One in nine black men, ages 20 to 34, are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.
Nationwide, the prison population hovers at almost 1.6 million, which surpasses all other countries for which there are reliable figures. The 50 states last year spent about $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections, up from nearly $11 billion in 1987. Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan and Oregon devote as much money or more to corrections as they do to higher education.
These statistics, contained in a new report from the Pew Center on the States, point to a terrible waste of money and lives. They underscore the urgent challenge facing the federal government and cash-strapped states to reduce their overreliance on incarceration without sacrificing public safety. The key, as some states are learning, is getting smarter about distinguishing between violent criminals and dangerous repeat offenders, who need a prison cell, and low-risk offenders, who can be handled with effective community supervision, electronic monitoring and mandatory drug treatment programs, combined in some cases with shorter sentences.
Persuading public officials to adopt a more rational, cost-effective approach to prison policy is a daunting prospect, however, not least because building and running jailhouses has become a major industry.
Criminal behavior partly explains the size of the prison population, but incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen. Any effort to reduce the prison population must consider the blunderbuss impact of get-tough sentencing laws adopted across the United States beginning in the 1970's. Many Americans have come to believe, wrongly, that keeping an outsized chunk of the population locked up is essential for sustaining a historic crime drop since the 1990's.
In fact, the relationship between imprisonment and crime control is murky. Some portion of the decline is attributable to tough sentencing and release policies. But crime is also affected by things like economic trends and employment and drug-abuse rates. States that lagged behind the national average in rising incarceration rates during the 1990's actually experienced a steeper decline in crime rates than states above the national average, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group.
A rising number of states are broadening their criminal sanctions with new options for low-risk offenders that are a lot cheaper than incarceration but still protect the public and hold offenders accountable. In New York, the crime rate has continued to drop despite efforts to reduce the number of nonviolent drug offenders in prison.
The Pew report spotlights policy changes in Texas and Kansas that have started to reduce their outsized prison populations and address recidivism by investing in ways to improve the success rates for community supervision, expanding treatment and diversion programs, and increasing use of sanctions other than prison for minor parole and probation violations. Recently, the Supreme Court and the United States Sentencing Commission announced sensible changes in the application of harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences.
These are signs that the country may finally be waking up to the fiscal and moral costs of bulging prisons.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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NEW YORK TIMES
February 29, 2008
U.S. Imprisons One in 100 Adults, Report Finds
By ADAM LIPTAK
For the first time in the nation's history, more than one in 100 American adults are behind bars, according to a new report.
Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million, after three decades of growth that has seen the prison population nearly triple. Another 723,000 people are in local jails.
The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.
Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 adult Hispanic men is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 adult black men is, too, as is one in nine black men ages 20 to 34.
The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that one in 355 white women ages 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one in 100 black women.
The report's methodology differed from that used by the Justice Department, which calculates the incarceration rate by using the total population rather than the adult population as the denominator. Using the department's methodology, about one in 130 Americans is behind bars.
The increase in the number of prisoners over the last 18 months, the Pew report says, pushed the national adult incarceration rate to just over one in 100.
'We aren't really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration,' said Susan Urahn, the center's managing director.
But Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge, said the Pew report considered only half of the cost-benefit equation and overlooked the 'very tangible benefits: lower crime rates.'
In the past 20 years, according the Federal Bureau of Investigation, rates of violent crimes fell by 25 percent, to 464 per 100,000 people in 2007 from 612.5 in 1987.
'While we certainly want to be smart about who we put into prisons,' Professor Cassell said, 'it would be a mistake to think that we can release any significant number of prisoners without increasing crime rates. One out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense.'
The United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. China is second, with 1.5 million people behind bars. The gap is even wider in percentage terms.
Germany imprisons 93 out of every 100,000 people, according to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London. The comparable number for the United States is roughly eight times that, or 750 out of 100,000.
Ms. Urahn said the nation could not afford the incarceration rate documented in the report.
'We tend to be a country in which incarceration is an easy response to crime,' she said. 'Being tough on crime is an easy position to take, particularly if you have the money. And we did have the money in the '80s and '90s.'
Now, with fewer resources available, the report said, 'prison costs are blowing a hole in state budgets.'
On average, states spend almost 7 percent of their budgets on corrections, trailing only health care, education and transportation.
In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 percent increase when adjusted for inflation. With money from bonds and the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the Pew report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion.
It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data were available. But state spending varies widely, from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in Louisiana.
'Getting tough on crime has gotten tough on taxpayers,' said Adam Gelb, the director of the public safety performance project at the Pew center. 'They don't want to spend $23,000 on a prison cell for a minor violation any more than they want a bridge to nowhere.'
The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the report said, and will accelerate as the prison population ages.
About one in nine state government employees works in corrections, and some states are finding it hard to fill those jobs. California spent more than $500 million on overtime alone in 2006.
The number of prisoners in California dropped by 4,000 last year, making Texas' prison system the nation's largest, at about 172,000. But the Texas Legislature last year approved broad changes to the state's corrections system, including expansions of drug treatment programs and drug courts and revisions to parole practices.
'Our violent offenders, we lock them up for a very long time ' rapists, murderers, child molesters,' said State Senator John Whitmire, Democrat of Houston and the chairman of the Senate's Criminal Justice Committee. 'The problem was that we weren't smart about nonviolent offenders. The Legislature finally caught up with the public.'
Mr. Whitmire gave an example.
'We have 5,500 D.W.I offenders in prison,' he said, including people caught driving under the influence who had not been in an accident. 'They're in the general population. As serious as drinking and driving is, we should segregate them and give them treatment.'
The Pew report recommended diverting nonviolent offenders away from prison and using punishments short of reincarceration for minor or technical violations of probation or parole. It also urged states to consider earlier release of some prisoners.
Before the recent changes in Texas, Mr. Whitmire said, 'we were recycling nonviolent offenders.'
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
