PRISON FELLOWSHIP BLOG: Uncategorized

“Counter to the prevailing expectation that crime would increase during a recession,” it actually dropped last year and violent crime is now at nearly a 40-year low. So said the New York Times last week. But what the Times did not report is precisely why it was so surprised to learn, yet again and probably not for the last time, how the “prevailing expectation” may be limited to people who think as did Marx (Karl maybe, Groucho for sure) that money is the root of all evil.

As budget battles in Washington and the states unfold, politicians are striving to achieve the most for their money, pinpointing where they can cut spending without sacrificing service.

Although lowering spending can mean major overhauls to a lot of services, some states have realized that with a little outside-the-box thinking, corrections reform can simultaneously decrease the taxpayer burden and increase the efficacy of criminal justice systems.

The word commonly used to describe a politician who publicly announces he wants to send fewer criminals to prison is “loser”. But back in February there was David Williams, president of Kentucky’s Senate, speaking in favour of a bill that would do just that.

This is how bad the economy is in southwestern Virginia: People are wishing they had more criminals in town.

That’s because Grayson County has a brand-new state prison standing empty. No prisoners. And that means no guards, no administrators, no staff, no jobs.

With California facing a Supreme Court order to reduce its prison population by as many as 46,000 inmates, the cash-strapped state will have plenty of options to consider — all of them bad.

By any standard, finding a new home for tens of thousands of state prisoners is daunting.

According to a recent report from the Houston Chronicle, Texas lawmakers took a significant step in the right direction when Governor Rick Perry signed the Texas Youth Commission reform bill.  It passed unanimously in the state senate, and with only two dissenting votes in the house, showing a unified sentiment by both parties that criminal justice reform is a priority.

Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates.

Justice Anthony M.

More than 160,000 inmates are serving time in California prisons. Two-thirds of released state prisoners return to prison within three years – contributing to the high cost of incarceration. Our state currently spends nearly $9 billion annually on corrections.

To help California close this revolving door, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has created a partnership with Prison Fellowship, which reaches out to prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families, to strengthen rehabilitation services.

My driving instructor used to be a member of a South L.A. gang, but business dried up in the 1990s, and he was forced to get a job instead. He’s about five feet tall, but everyone calls him “Big.” “It was pretty sweet round here in the Nineties,” Big tells me as we navigate the barren streets between the Westside and South Central.

Police officers following a suspect into an apartment complex in Lexington, Ky., don’t know which apartment their man has entered. But wafting through one of the closed apartment doors is the familiar odor of marijuana. The smell provides reason to believe criminal activity is afoot, probable cause for a warrant to search the apartment.

In 2008, as Hurricane Ike battered the Gulf of Mexico, inmates at the Carol Vance Unit in Houston, Texas, followed the news closely, worried about family and friends in the affected regions. Ron Zifer, a reentry program manager, arranged for them to call their families, but never realized the eye-opening revelations he’d experience soon after they dialed.

Sexual abuse is an uncomfortable topic, but it is a terrible reality for many men and woman inside and out of prison. 

In the early 1980s, Don Disharoon struggled with alcohol and drugs, lost his family and his possessions, and faced a double life sentence in prison. He thought his life was over.

God disagreed, and through His grace Don accepted Jesus Christ, was water baptized, and agreed to a plea bargain resulting in a 24-year sentence.

The legal scholar Derrick A. Bell foresaw that mass incarceration, like earlier systems of racial control, would continue to exist as long as it served the perceived interests of white elites.

Thirty years of civil rights litigation and advocacy have failed to slow the pace of a racially biased drug war or to prevent the emergence of a penal system of astonishing size.

Since founding Prison Fellowship 35 years ago, Chuck has visited hundreds of prisons. But his recent return to Maxwell struck him with particular force. As he walked the grounds where he was once incarcerated, he remembered the loneliness that prisoners experience.