STUDY WARNS OF RISING TIDE OF RELEASED INMATES

More than 625,000 former prisoners will be coming back into U.S. society
this year, part of a record flow of inmates who will face crushing
obstacles in finding work and housing and repairing long-fractured family
ties, according to a newly released study.

The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based nonprofit agency, found that
returning inmates often face so many restrictions after long stretches of
incarceration that the conditions amount to more years of "invisible
punishment." The study warned that their chances of staying out of prison
and remaining crime-free are greatly diminished by laws that were promoted
as being tough on crime.

Denial of welfare benefits for even minor drug-related offenses, rejection
of former inmates for accommodations in public housing, a lack of
drug-treatment programs, restrictions on employment and a dearth of
transitional housing are some of the factors that make it difficult for
former inmates to reenter society, the study's authors say.

"There's always been an American belief that once you pay your debt, you
are free to rejoin the community, but these policies now form a sort of
permanent second-class citizenship," said Marc Mauer, assistant director of
the Sentencing Project and co-editor of the report.

For years, the Sentencing Project has championed alternatives to
incarceration and called for criminal justice reforms. The study, released
this week, was presented in 16 essays and reports that were collected in a
355-page book, "Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass
Incarceration."

Last year, more than 25,000 former prisoners returned to communities in the
District, Maryland and Virginia, a volume projected to continue for the
foreseeable future. Advocates are not the only ones concerned that the
former inmates could fall back into crime.

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said that 43 percent of the city's
homicide victims this year were released from the D.C. jail or from federal
prison within the last two years. Not all were convicted felons, he said;
some had served time for misdemeanors or had been in jail awaiting trial.

Each year, more than 2,000 former inmates return from prison to District
streets, and Ramsey said that many return without job prospects. He said
some are killed while trying to reclaim their positions in the drug trade
and neighborhood crews. "Some of it's drugs. . . . Some of it is old scores
being settled," Ramsey said.

"I think many of them, if given an opportunity and given a job, would not
fall prey to this," Ramsey said in an interview.

About 9,000 inmates were released from state prisons in Virginia in fiscal
2002, and 14,000 in Maryland.

U.S. prison and jail populations have mushroomed from 501,000 to 2 million
people during the past two decades, by far the most among industrialized
nations. The aftershocks of that wave of incarcerations are beginning to be
felt, analysts and law enforcement officials say.

The number of inmates being released has more than doubled since 1994, when
it was 272,000, and there is no agreement about how best to deal with the
return of so many to their old neighborhoods. Justice Department statistics
show that more than 60 percent of former inmates are rearrested within
three years of release.

Some laws have destroyed the "safety net" for returning prisoners,
according to the Sentencing Project and other experts.

The Higher Education Act of 1998, for example, bars people convicted of
drug-related offenses from receiving student loans. In one recent school
year, more than 9,000 people were deemed ineligible for the help.

Amy Hirsch, an attorney with Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, has
studied a 1996 federal law that imposes a lifetime ban on people convicted
of drug offenses from receiving family welfare benefits and food stamps.
She found that the law had a devastating effect on women released from prison.

More than 80 percent of the women in Hirsch's study said that they began
using drugs in their early teens after suffering some form of sexual abuse
and that they did not receive drug treatment until they entered the prison
system.

"They come out of jail hopeful, clean and sober, and then come out and run
into this brick wall," Hirsch said. "All the things they need to get their
life started back is off limits, and there's nothing they can do about it.
They wind up homeless, back on street . . . that law has a terrible effect
on their ability to refrain from relapsing into addiction."

A number of states have opted out of the federal law, she said, as
lawmakers have come to realize the unanticipated effects of the legislation.

Toni, a 46-year-old D.C. woman who spoke on the condition that her last
name not be used, has spent 18 years in prison for three armed robberies.
She was released from prison last September and is slowly building a new
life, turning a community-service assignment from her parole into a
full-time job as a receptionist with a women's support group. She attends
seven Narcotics Anonymous meetings a week and last week moved out of
transitional housing.

"I've stayed connected with people who are positive and who showed me I
could get where I wanted to be," she said. "I've had a lot of help, and I
stay very close to those people. I wanted to do better for myself finally,
to stop living in the past."

Some lawmakers are working to rescind some of the restrictions cited in the
Sentencing Project's study. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has introduced
legislation to make former drug offenders eligible for the student loan
program. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) has worked on a bill that would
allow released felons to vote in federal elections.

Yesterday, Reps. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) and Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.)
announced that they were introducing legislation to provide tax credits to
encourage the construction of transitional housing for former inmates who
emerge from prison without a place to live or immediate job prospects.

Drawing support from a number of nationwide advocacy organizations,
including the Legal Action Center and the National Alliance to End
Homelessness, Davis and Souder called for better ways of helping inmates
return to society.

The Sentencing Project's study noted that incarceration rates and the
problems of returning inmates carry distinct racial overtones.

One contributor to the report, Donald Braman, spent three years studying
the impact of high incarceration on D.C. families. Braman cited an earlier
study that found that half of the black male population ages 18 to 35 in
the District is under some form of correctional supervision, and he
estimated that 7 percent of the adult black male population returns from
prison to city neighborhoods each year.

Margaret Love, a former Justice Department attorney who recently chaired a
city commission that researched sites for new halfway houses, said the
stigma of incarceration is difficult to overcome.

"People are scared to death of criminals and don't see them as members of
our community," she said.

Staff writer David A. Fahrenthold contributed to this report.