“What are you going to do to help me when I get out?”
The question comes from Russell, an inmate at a medium-security prison who is studying for his GED and preparing for release. It was posed to Leonard Pitts Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning jouralist for the Miami Herald, but as Pitts points out in a recent article, it is a question that could be asked to any of us.
It is beyond any serious dispute that the corrections system here in the United States is broken and in need of reform. As Pitts points out, the U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet nearly 25 percent of its prisoners. At the end of 2010, over seven million adults were incarcerated, which includes roughly one out of every 100 adult males.
The temptation is to dismiss those behind bars as worthy of the punishment they have received. This is no doubt true of many, if not most, of those who inhabit our prisons. But the temptation to look at prison as solely punitive is not without its own perils.
Taking a hard-line approach to corrections that ignores the importance of rehabilitation fails to acknowledge that most of those criminals currently in prison will be released. And the track record of those being released is not good. Nearly half of the 700,000 inmates being released this year will return to prison within three years, with a full two-thirds eventually reoffending.
Without offering effective reentry programs to inmates like Russell, such recivism rates are likely to continue, if not increase. Even ex-prisoners who want to “fly right” are often thwarted by a lack of job opportunities, insufficient assistance in helping re-acclimate to society, and an absence of meaningful support and mentoring once they are released.
Fortunately, there are programs that do help inmates and ex-prisoners prepare for life outside the prison walls. Programs like the InnerChange Freedom Initiative offer counselling, education, and real world training to inmates; and the development of coalitions of support through programs like Out4Life have proven very effective in reducing recidivism rates – and usually with little or no taxpayer assistance. However, the availability of such programs is often limited, and the need for volunteers to assist those returning to society from prison is great.
So, what are we doing to help these inmates? How we answer that question will go a long way to determining what kind of society we wish to have.