The Prison Explosion, Part 3e

CONVICTS NEED SUPPORT, TRAINING

Imagine leaving prison on parole after serving several years for buying a
few ounces of cocaine.

You stand there on the street, blinking in the sunlight, unsure what to do
with yourself. You've paid your debt to society. You want more than
anything else to stay straight, to work for a living, to turn your life
around. This is the situation a lot of ex-convicts find themselves in. But
with little hope and no prospects before them, it's often all many of them
can do to keep away from their old life of drugs and crime -- and
eventually wind up behind bars again.

As long as this no-win cycle continues, society pays a heavy cost -- not
only financially but also in wasted human lives and fractured families.
When nonviolent drug offenders are simply locked up, they're still
unemployable addicts when they're set free again. Worse, the prison
experience might make some of them potentially violent. That's why state
corrections officials ought to keep emphasizing prison programs proven
effective at breaking the prison cycle: These programs work and cost the
public a lot less in the long run.

Drug treatment -- It costs the public about $80 a day to keep a drug
offender in a New York state prison -- not including the police, legal and
court costs to taxpayers that precede every conviction. But it costs only
$65 a day, for instance, to keep a drug offender in the Intensive Treatment
Alternative Program run jointly by the Dutchess County mental health and
probation departments. Yet there's an even greater savings when lives are
rehabilitated: when convicts become productive, taxpaying citizens again,
rather than continuing to burden the law enforcement, judicial and prison
systems.

But in 1995 Gov. George Pataki eliminated funding for work release for
violent prisoners, a program that prepares inmates for release by having
them work in the community. That makes sense because it eliminates an
obvious risk to the general public. But, unfortunately, this decision
became a pretext for cutting funds for substance abuse programs that served
as a prelude to work release -- not only for the violent but for all
prisoners. Now, the only drug treatment available at maximum security
prisons is provided by nonprofessional volunteers through self-help groups.
Overall, only one in seven prisoners is enrolled in alcohol and drug abuse
programs at any given time -- and these are too short, according to
correctional officers union spokesman Dennis Fitzpatrick. ''The truly
meaningful programs must established from the beginning to the end of a
person's incarceration,'' he said.

This is simply shortsighted budgeting, since several studies have found
substance abuse treatment saves public money. One by the RAND Corp., a
nonprofit think tank, determined that treatment reduced drug-related crime
at 15 times the rate of incarceration. Every dollar spent on treatment
reduces consumption of drugs at a rate eight times higher than a dollar
spent on prisons, it found.

College education -- Penny-wise and pound-foolish is also the best way to
describe Pataki's decision to eliminate another effective program from the
state budget. Again in 1995, he crossed out funding that enabled prisoners
to take college courses. Although this program cost the equivalent of less
than 1 percent of the state's prison budget, studies show it cut recidivism
-- the rate at which former inmates return to prison -- in half. Federal
Pell Grant funds also were eliminated by the Clinton administration. Today,
only a few prisoners are able to take courses sponsored by private
organizations.

Eliminating an inexpensive, effective program makes no sense. ''The college
programs were occupying a lot of the best, more motivated inmates who also
have the tendency to cause the most difficulty,'' said Timothy Decker, who
managed the Dutchess Community College program, the state's first, for
seven years. State officials justify the decision by pointing to the
thousands of inmates who don't even have a high school degree -- but the
college money is just gone, not redirected to prisoner high school education.

This program ought to be re-established; perhaps with the proviso that
inmates' college studies take the form of low-interest, or even no-interest
loans that they have to pay back after they get out of prison.

Legal support -- The Pataki administration also has virtually eliminated
funding for Prisoners' Legal Services, which helps inmates negotiate the
legal system. Although the U.S. Constitution require states to provide
convicts with lawyer services, state officials argue that prison law
libraries and court-appointed attorneys are sufficient -- even though
lawyers don't volunteer their services often, and even though prisoners
rarely have the training to read law books and represent themselves. Still,
this program, when fully funded, paid for itself through just one of its
activities: correcting miscalculations of convicts' release dates. Current
winds of political doctrine insist that public officials must not appear to
be soft on crime. They apparently worry that state residents will object to
criminals getting free job training or a free college education, when
law-abiding citizens have to pay for these things themselves. But citizens
surely also object to paying more in taxes than they have to, which means
it's vital for officials to keep New York's runaway budget under control.
In the short term, it costs taxpayers more to fund inmate programs that
change lives. But if, in the long run, it saves the cost of imprisoning
people again and again -- and if it returns those people to productive,
taxpaying lives -- these expenses are worth every penny.