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Dan Rodricks: If 'defund prisons' means transforming them, then by all means, let's do it

Ames Tribune - 6/18/2020

If by "defund prisons," the people using that phrase mean "transform prisons," I support it and have for many years, but most intensely since June 2005. That's when I wrote a column asking the drug dealers of Baltimore to call me if they wanted help "getting out of the game." Over the next three years, thousands of people -- mostly black men between the ages of 25 and 55 -- called or wrote for help finding jobs or a program to assist them with their difficult transitions to life after prison.

I tried to keep up with the phone calls and letters, assembling and updating a list of the few companies willing to hire people with criminal records and the handful of local agencies offering to help ex-offenders.

I interviewed hundreds of men who were adamant that they did not want to return to selling drugs or, as one fellow put it, "selling poison to my people." They wanted to stop being embarrassments to their families. They wanted jobs.

Were they all sincere? I think most of them were, yes. Did they all manage to break the cycle, get off the street and into something like a normal, crime-free life? Tough to say. I did not have a staff to track the men after our first contact. I gave them information about possible jobs, job training and reentry programs. After that, I would not know what happened to a guy unless he got back in touch, and some did.

Clearly, the Maryland prison system had done little to help these guys get ready for life back in the Baltimore neighborhoods from where most had come.

They were drug addicts, low-level drug dealers, armed robbers, check forgers, shoplifters, car thieves; and a few had been convicted of attempted murder. Many had finished their high school education while incarcerated; some had taken college courses and vocational training classes. But, instead of finding steady employment, they found constant rejection. Their criminal records were the biggest obstacle to getting hired, and that turned out to be a sleeping giant of an issue in our midst.

The penalty for committing a crime in this country lasts a lot longer than most Americans understand. Seven years after I immersed myself in the problems of the ex-offender, Michelle Alexander's important book, "The New Jim Crow," detailed how men who came out of state and federal prisons were continually penalized for their crimes -- unable to get jobs, rent apartments, vote or, in some cases, even get a driver's license.

There has been some progress in some states, including Maryland, since then. But our system still generally emphasizes punishment over rehabilitation, and way too many ex-offenders fail at reentry.

A study by the Department of Justice found that 80 percent of inmates released from state prisons in 2005 had been locked up again by 2014. The nation's recidivism rate -- the percentage of inmates who reoffend and return to prison within three years of their release -- was around 66 percent a few years ago. It has dropped significantly since then in some states, including Maryland. The rate here fell to about 40 percent, but changes in laws and a trend toward fewer arrests, in Baltimore particularly, probably contributed to that drop as much as any change in prison programming.

While better than in the past, a 40 percent failure rate is still not acceptable.

So when we talk about "transforming prisons," if that's what is meant by "defunding" them, then the whole system needs to be reimagined.

We have to keep locking up killers; they need to be punished and kept away from the rest of us. But that does not mean locking them up forever, and it does not mean treating them as lost causes, as we do now with most of them. Even those sentenced to life should get a chance to become better human beings, to return and contribute to society. We have a system in place for assessing inmates already. It's called the Maryland Parole Commission. If anything, we should expand its role in tracking inmate progress.

When lifers are ready to be released, after earning a recommendation by the parole commission, they should get to come out of prison, and not have to wait longer because of politics. (Maryland still allows its governor to reject parole for lifers, and that has resulted in many extra years of incarceration for hundreds of inmates, some now in their 60s, 70s and 80s.)

Everyone we incarcerate should get full rehabilitative treatment from the moment they arrive in a prison. That should be the abiding ethic of a future correctional system. We should put corrections in better balance with punishment.

It's foolish for taxpayers to support with billions of dollars the warehousing of convicted criminals so that when they are released -- and some 90 percent of them are -- they come out no better than they went in, or worse. It is a waste of money if men and women who go to prison return to us with no plan for successful reentry -- no marketable skills, no job lined up, no place to live, no sense of future.

We should turn some prisons into hospitals to treat people with drug and alcohol addiction or mental illness. We should hire more social workers, teachers and counselors, people who want to change lives and save lives. We should have a system in place for reconciliation so that criminals can make peace with their victims and victims are empowered to forgive.

This is all part of the ethic of restorative justice. It says some human beings do terrible things, often when they are young and troubled, but, as human rights attorney Bryan Stevenson put it, "each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done." It says no human life should be cast aside forever. It says we believe in justice and mercy, in redemption and second chances.

Dan Rodricks is a long-time columnist for The Baltimore Sun.

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