There’s more to justice than prison (continued)

THE ENTRY TO the Family Life Center’s Broad Street office leads to a drab white room resembling the waiting room of a doctor’s office. A table on the left is covered with flyers for programs in guided meditation, computer literacy, and a Spanish-language relapse prevention group. A large calendar drawn on a dry-erase board behind the front desk, which is staffed by an ex-offender, indicates these events. Four computers line the opposite wall, where Nick Horton, a recent Brown graduate who is now a development specialist at the FLC, aids a man who looks to be in his mid-30s compose a resume.

Horton is trying to help the man remember the dates of a previous job. "I thought you said it was from ’93 to ’97," he suggests. "Like ’93 to ’97!" the man replies jovially, "I said, like . . . I don’t remember the year. That’s what’s got me stuck."

The man is applying for a job working on the FLC’s legislative push to change felon disenfranchisement laws. He indicates that he is a perfectionist, and will not be satisfied if his résumé simply makes him appear qualified — he wants to impress. The dates elude him, he says, because, "Everything I want to remember is from now on, not before I went to jail."

This is also Rodriguez’s job — "Separating the crime from the person," as she puts it. In her office on the second floor of the Broad Street building, she smiles as sirens blare nearby, and exclaims, "The sounds of South Providence!" When she arrived at the FLC less than two years ago, most of the organization’s money was used for case-management, establishing the center as a "one-stop shop for formerly incarcerated people and their families."

The Family Life Center, launched as a collaboration between the DOC and a number of community-based and faith-based organizations, has since discarded an earlier model to concentrate on evaluating how ex-offenders can address their material needs while "impacting their behavior and their way of thinking." Director Wall, who has worked in the DOC for 20 years and been in charge for the last five, explains the state’s shift in thinking about recidivism: "About five years ago, when we were looking at the department’s mission of public safety, we began to define that responsibility in broader ways." After focusing for so long on building an effective prison system, "We recognized that public safety not only involves the operation of safe, secure, and orderly correctional institutions, but also preparation for law-abiding and productive lives after release."

A few years ago, "there were no resources out in the community," for ex-offenders, Rodriguez recalls. The legal obstacles to reentry were as prominent as the social ones. "They were pretty much disenfranchised from everything," Rodriguez asserts. Early in her tenure, the FLC began to shift resources toward advocacy. Last year, the center and its supporters won their first major battle, passing legislation that restored the right of ex-offenders convicted of drug offenses to receive food stamps. (Previously, convicted rapists and child molesters could get food stamps once released, but not someone convicted of dealing marijuana.)

Advocates argue that "America’s least wanted" must be made to feel wanted to reduce recidivism. Beyond the systemic issues that have led to the nation’s prison population boom – bad schools, poverty, racial prejudice, the political tenor of the war on drugs — ex-offenders face a host of barriers to successful re-entry, from low self-esteem to lack of job skills. Prisoners generally return to society undereducated, unskilled, and with few opportunities that might divert them from returning to criminal activity. While correctional facilities offer some programs and services to inmates, it is organizations such as the FLC that bridge the gap between prison and the community. "The rubber meets the rope when they leave the [prison] institution," acknowledges Wall, "and have to cope with the difficulties they encounter with life on the street."

Peter Slom recalls having "no real job skills when I got out of prison." After finishing his sentence, he completed a six-month drug treatment program at Galilee Mission, a halfway house in Narragansett. "If you really want to do well," he says, "they’ll really work, with you. We need more programs like that. He then relocated from Newport to South County, managed to get a job at a friend’s restaurant, and began going to college part-time. "I figured I would be a drug counselor," he says, half-joking, "It was the only thing I knew a lot about."

As a drug counselor, Slom had the chance to give others the support they needed to stop doing drugs. "A lot of people don’t get that," he says, noting that three out of four prisoners in the US have a history of substance abuse. "I was fortunate because I had family members who helped me out."

Rehabilitation programs aim to intervene in the lives of offenders, changing them in a way that imprisonment cannot, but the success of these programs, of course, is not unqualified. California’s Proposition 36, passed in 2000, gave offenders the possibility of going into rehab programs rather than jail.

But a University of California-Los Angeles study released in November found that diverted nonviolent drug offenders were rearrested at higher rates than those who entered drug courts or underwent treatment as a term of their probation after serving time. There have been two major problems with Prop. 36. First, it created a surfeit of patients for treatment programs without sufficiently increasing the amount of resources necessary to treat them. Because of this, a second problem occurred. Many people were not given the proper services suggested by their needs. Ex-offenders who needed treatment often ended up in outpatient programs, while clinics sometimes bypassed serious cases that might lower their rate of success and, thus, decrease their funding. Proponents are still enthusiastic about the overall achievements of Prop. 36, which costs $120 million each year.

To a degree, the success of treatment programs is difficult to gauge, as this depends on the clients. "If a person’s not ready to change once they get out of prison," Slom observes, "they’re going to go back, no matter what you do."

Influential national groups like the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) have yet to be convinced of the efficacy or social benefits of programs aiming to reintegrate ex-offenders, emphasizing instead a continued focus on law enforcement. (In California, the Correctional Peace Officers Association has been a major contributor to California politicians and the state’s most powerful advocate of tougher sentencing laws.) The FOP is opposing two bills in this session of Congress that would restore federal voting rights for felons in two states.

In Rhode Island, West Warwick Police Chief Peter Brousseau, president of the Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association, says the law enforcement community is generally supportive of exploring alternatives to incarceration for non-violent drug offenders. "If you have somebody who has a drug problem, that [rehabilitation] seems like a good way to go," says Brousseau. "The core issue is drug rehabilitation . . . It can help keep them [drug offenders] on the straight and narrow."

Critics of reentry programs see the relationship between offenders and the criminal justice system as basically punitive, with post-release supervision ostensibly ensuring just that the parolee keeps out of trouble. But supervision by a parole officer addresses only the possibility of a criminal act, while neglecting the social circumstances that often lead people to criminal activity. Even being clean does not guarantee ex-offenders a job. "If you don’t have a job, you've got to find another way to make money," Slom hints. "Employment is huge." The difficulty of finding decent jobs is one of the primary obstacles for ex-offenders.

Carcieri seems to concur. "These people are coming out, but they have no income," he lamented in a November RI-PBS special on prisoner reentry. "They don’t have a job, they don’t have, really, much of anything." He acknowledged that the crucial step of employment is difficult, because "people are often loath to hire former inmates." Each day in prison means lost job experience and isolation from the social networks that can aid gainful employment. Instead, inmates associate primarily with a criminalized prison population. Once outside, it is often easiest to turn to these familiar networks for social and financial support. Additionally, prison life allows for the disintegration of the responsibilities and self-regard necessary for success in the workforce. To overcome this obstacle, the Family Life Center is forming relationships with job placement organizations to offer companies incentives to hire ex-offenders and assurances that they are ready for full employment.

There is a consensus among advocates that job-training programs must start well before prisoners are released, helping ex-offenders to develop "hard" and "soft" skills — technical knowledge to make them assets to potential employers and social skills to smooth the transition. Not surprisingly, given how ex-offenders disproportionately lack rudimentary skills, studies have found that those taking part in educational programs have significantly lower rates of recidivism.

To fight the stigma that follows ex-offenders when they complete their sentences, hindering the search for employment, the federal government began In 1996 to provide tax credits to companies that hire ex-offenders. On the local level, by forging relationships with groups like the FLC, organizations like Flagship Staffing Services are able to recommend ex-offenders who have completed job-training programs to third-party companies without reservation.

A major challenge for the DOC and the Family Life Center is posed by how most ex-offenders need more than jobs. They need access to multiple services to address problems as diverse as low self-esteem and inconsistent access to food. Once out of jail, additional puzzles come with trying to navigate the myriad systems of public support for food, health-care, job placement, substance abuse treatment, and the like.