Thousands of offenders leave prison each year unprepared for life on the outside. Returning to impoverished neighborhoods, they lack job skills and support systems. Not surprisingly, nearly half of released inmates are back behind bars within three years.
The public’s fear of crime — and politicians’ fear of being perceived as soft on crime — has resulted in more and longer incarcerations in recent decades. Now lawmakers are once again embracing the sensible concept of rehabilitation.
President George Bush made the sea change official last week by signing the Second Chance Act, a measure that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress.
State and local governments and nonprofit groups will receive $165 million a year to help offenders with schooling, drug and alcohol treatment, housing, employment and the rebuilding of family and community ties.
States, motivated in part by fiscal concerns, have already been moving in that direction. Kansas passed a law last year creating community corrections districts and making money available for services to offenders serving probation or parole.
Early results show that people are about 30 percent less likely to violate the terms of their probations or commit new crimes if they receive drug and alcohol treatment and other services, said Rep. Pat Colloton, a Leawood Republican who spearheaded the legislation.
The effort has enabled Kansas to postpone a costly prison construction program.
The early success of the Kansas program earned Colloton an invitation to Bush’s signing ceremony in Washington. U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, a key Republican sponsor of the federal legislation, also attended.
Rehabilitation undoubtedly will have its failures. Some will make headlines. And no one is recommending that murderers, sex offenders and violent criminals be quickly put back into society.
But too much of the nation’s prison space is occupied by the mentally ill, and by persons arrested on drug crimes and probation violations. Our resources are much better spent on education, treatment and housing for this population than on lengthy and repeated incarcerations.
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We need to be doing something about problems before....
it comes to people committing crimes. Poverty, people without jobs and health care, people not getting an education - these are things that lead people to crime. I feel that if a person has a decent place to live, has enough food to eat, has health care, has a decent job with benefits, then the chances of that person or someone in his or her family of turning to crime are highly reduced. Every individual has a responsibility to help someone less fortunate than themselves, we have a responsibility of extending a hand to someone in need, we need to remember to do the decent thing. Help someone get a decent job, help a kid who is struggling in school, help someone who needs some health care, the list can go on forever but all of these needs can be met by each one of us in so many ways. We need to set the example for our government and elected officials who certainly are not doing the job.