TOO LITTLE SECOND CHANCES FOR PRISONERS

ON TUESDAY NIGHT President Bush called for the funding of programs to
deal with some 600,000 inmates who will be released from prison this
year -- without work, without a home, without help. "America," he
said, is the "land of second chances," and he added that when the
"gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better
life." I applaud the thought, but it is too little, too late.

I have seen the impact of imprisonment on the human beings I sentence.
As a federal judge, I take pains to monitor these men and women after
their release from prison. I visit the programs that our Probation
Office uses for ex-offenders to support their efforts to restart their
lives.

The programs teach or reteach the most fundamental life skills -- how
to dress for a job, how to eat nutritiously, how to apply for
employment, how to be in a relationship, how to parent. And I am
struck over and over again by how difficult the task is.

The problem is that the policies our government has implemented, long
before those prison gates are open, undermine a prisoner's opportunity
for a second chance. Too many prisoners are serving sentences that are
too long under conditions that are not remotely conducive to
rehabilitation. We must change our approach long before reentry.

In fact, Bush's $300 million initiative reminds me of a homeowner who,
midwinter, turns up the thermostat but leaves the front door open. It
seems like a great idea, but it misses the real problems.

We sentence more and more nonviolent offenders to ever increasing
imprisonment terms. The sentencing guidelines require judges to impose
prison terms of 10, 15, 20 years, as if they are just numbers, rather
than real punishments for real people, with real consequences.

While ever increasing prison terms enable some to vent their spleen
about the "crime problem," they do little or nothing to effect a
solution: Lengthy prison terms undermine an offender's chances for a
meaningful life after prison. They destroy communities and decimate
families that are already struggling, especially in our inner-cities.
And from those decimated communities comes more crime.

We do little to prepare offenders for release while they are in
prison. Money slated for drug-treatment programs gets recycled into
barbed wire, and walls. Upon release, there are fewer and fewer places
for prisoners to go.

On Christmas Eve 2002, the Bureau of Prison announced that it would no
longer place offenders who are six months before the end of their
prison term to half-way houses; they now must wait until they have
reached the last 10 percent of their terms, no matter how short a time
that is. Nor would the bureau allow nonviolent offenders sentenced to
short terms to be placed in the halfway houses either.

When I recently visited a halfway house in Boston, I learned that
inmates' terms there are now so short that the staff -- a talented
group of professionals -- could barely provide them with the skills
they needed, a job, decent housing, a future.

With fewer and fewer government referrals for nonviolent offenders,
many halfway houses have had to close their doors. Using "faith based"
groups to fill this considerable gap, as the president's speech
suggests, is not likely to be either adequate or fair.

In fact, talk of "reentry" seems to many to be a cruel joke in a
society where the race to punish has made it next to impossible for
ex-offenders to get public assistance or qualify for a host of
government programs.

It seems to many to be an empty promise in an economy where there are
fewer and fewer jobs, especially for an ex-offender who may be lacking
in skills and facing discrimination.

So while the call for a "reentry initiative," sounds laudable enough,
where everything we do to these offenders before the prison gates open
is inconsistent with giving them a "second chance," it is too little,
too late. Reentry should begin at sentencing, and not a moment later.