SEEKING REDEMPTION AFTER PRISON

The compassion and bipartisanship that President Bush promised in the
2000 election campaign made a long-awaited appearance this week as he
signed a law to help prisoners re-enter society. The Second Chance
Act, five years in the making, is a welcome relief from the
simplistic lock-'em-up posture of recent decades that has the United
States leading the world in incarceration. It is an important start,
but more still needs to be done.

Close to 1.6 million Americans are in prison, a figure that does not
count the more than 700,000 people held in local jails. While 650,000
prisoners are released each year, an estimated two-thirds of them can
expect to return to prison within three years. Little help is
extended for newly released prisoners making this unpromising
transition, particularly compared with society's mammoth investment
in building more prisons.

The failure to integrate former prisoners into society is bad for
them and for society, since it leads to more crime. The new law
offers grants to state and local governments and nonprofit groups
specializing in housing, health and employment for ex-prisoners. It
emphasizes vocational training, individual mentoring and better drug
treatment. And it calls for pilot programs for elderly nonviolent
offenders, who cost more than $20,000 a year to keep in prison, as
well as alternatives to jail for parents convicted of nonviolent crimes.

The $326 million that the law promises has yet to be appropriated.
Congress should quickly allocate the money as a down payment on a
goal that Mr. Bush described as redemption, as he alluded to his own
past struggle against alcoholism.

The Second Chance Act should be the start of a new, more enlightened
approach to criminal justice. The obvious next step is for the
administration to retreat from its support for unduly harsh prison
sentences, which are enormously expensive -- and leave the criminal
justice system with too few resources to do the sort of
rehabilitative work the new law wisely calls for.