CLOSING THE REVOLVING DOOR

The United States is paying a heavy price for the mandatory
sentencing fad that swept the country 30 years ago. After a tenfold
increase in the nation's prison population -- and a corrections price
tag that exceeds $60 billion a year -- the states have often been
forced to choose between building new prisons or new schools. Worse
still, the country has created a growing felon caste, now more than
16 million strong, of felons and ex-felons, who are often driven back
to prison by policies that make it impossible for them to find jobs,
housing or education.

Congress could begin to address this problem by passing the Second
Chance Act, which would offer support services for people who are
leaving prison. But it would take more than one new law to undo 30
years of damage:

. Researchers have shown that inmates who earn college degrees tend
to find jobs and stay out of jail once released. Congress needs to
revoke laws that bar inmates from receiving Pell grants and that bar
some students with drug convictions from getting other support.
Following Washington's lead, the states have destroyed prison
education programs that had long since proved their worth.

. People who leave prison without jobs or places to live are unlikely
to stay out of jail. Congress should repeal the lifetime ban on
providing temporary welfare benefits to people with felony drug
convictions. The federal government should strengthen tax credit and
bonding programs that encourage employers to hire people with
criminal records. States need to stop barring ex-offenders from jobs
because of unrelated crimes -- or arrests in the distant past that
never led to convictions.

. Congress should deny a request from the F.B.I. to begin including
juvenile arrests that never led to convictions (and offenses like
drunkenness or vagrancy) in the millions of rap sheets sent to
employers. That would transform single indiscretions into lifetime stigmas.

. Curbing recidivism will also require doing a lot more to provide
help and medication for the one out of every six inmates who suffer
mental illness.

The only real way to reduce the inmate population -- and the felon
class -- is to ensure that imprisonment is a method of last resort.
That means abandoning the mandatory sentencing laws that have filled
prisons to bursting with nonviolent offenders who are doomed to
remain trapped at the very margins of society.