ENSURING ONE-WAY PRISON EXITS

Every day, on average, 115 men and women walk out of Illinois prisons.
That's more than at any other time in Illinois history.

Less than half of them have completed high school or its equivalent.
Many have drug or alcohol addictions. Some have untreated mental
illnesses. Most have spotty employment records and poor job skills.
Needless to say, their job prospects aren't promising.

It should be little surprise, then, that three-quarters of the 42,000
people released this year in Illinois will be rearrested for a new
crime within three years. And 55 percent of those released will be
shipped back to prison by 2008.

Crime rates have dropped in the last decade, while Illinois' prison
population has exploded. There's no doubt that putting away more
violent offenders protects the public. But much of the growth in the
prison population has been in low-level drug and non-violent
offenders. What folks often forget is that the vast majority of state
inmates get released--most in less than two years.

The impact on state budgets is enormous. The impact on communities is
even more profound.

Nearly 47,000 ex-cons live in Cook County alone, according to the
Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. In DuPage County,
it's nearly 700. Lake County has close to 1,000. In Will County, it's
nearly 800.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich rightly understands that Illinois can't afford to
continue building ever more prisons and sending ever more offenders to
jail. The state needs to prevent crime and reduce the prison population.

That can be done in a variety of ways.

One is to address the reason so many crimes are committed: drug
addiction. A new program focused on drug-involved offenders
established last year at Sheridan Correctional Center is showing early
promise, reducing the rearrest rates among participants by as much as
55 percent. Those who voluntarily enter the program undergo intensive
drug treatment, cognitive skills development, vocational education and
job preparation. When they are released from prison, they are followed
closely by parole agents, whose jobs aren't just to track whether
they're messing up, but to help them succeed. The Sheridan project is
so new, however, it's unclear whether such a phenomenal success rate
will hold up over time.

Blagojevich's recent move to establish the Statewide Community Safety
& Re-entry Working Group to study this and other approaches to reduce
the state's prison population is welcome. Its 40 members will be
charged with recommending ways to help former inmates re-enter the
community and settle into crime-free lives.

"You can't fix generations of crime problems in every community
overnight, but you can try to target the root causes of their criminal
behavior," said Deanne Benos, assistant director of the Illinois
Department of Corrections, who has been pushing the idea of reducing
recidivism and helping inmate re-entry as a way to lower crime. It's
not a particularly new idea. Just one that states are beginning to
realize they can't afford to ignore.