President Bush's $300 million proposal to help ex-offenders reconnect with society has shut up his regular critics who say it is an effort long overdue.
"It's one thing he got right," says Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
Since 2000, some 600,000 persons are released from state and federal prisons annually, more than the population of the District of Columbia (570,898). That rounds out to over 1,600 prisoners daily, which is four times the number of those released just 20 years ago.
Re-entry programs provide job training, transitional housing and drug and alcohol abuse treatment to help ease ex-prisoners back into society. Bush proposed his Prisoner Re-entry Initiative in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday.
"[They are] poorly educated, typically with histories of substance abuse, mostly African American or Latino, mostly men, and often with histories of violence. They struggle to adjust from the regimented, artificial life in prison, to the chaotic, often disorienting life in their old neighborhoods," observed Jeremy Travis, a senior fellow at the D.C.-based Urban Institute.
Re-entry resources "have not kept pace" with the huge amounts of money spent to build prisons, Travis says.
Those who have pushed hard for re-entry programs have testified at political hearings over the years that law-and-order policies, personified by then-Gov. George Bush and his Texas Justice, built more prisons and rounded up more people to fill them. But at the end of prison terms, this ever-growing population was dumped back into communities (sometimes in the middle of the night wearing orange jumpsuits, as has happened in the District of Columbia) without any preparation for life on the outside.
"The aggressive cycle of arrest, removal, incarceration and re-entry is highly concentrated in communities that are already facing the enormous challenges of poverty, crime, disinvestments and inadequate social services," says Travis.
Without job training, without housing, without treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, released prisoners, like Vietnam and Persian Gulf veterans, become members of the homeless population. In addition, according to Department of Justice statistics, most will be re-arrested within three years, and many will be returned to prison for new crimes or parole violations.
Last year, the Department of Justice divvied up $104 million to 49 states for re-entry programs but, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, most of these funds have
been held up because there isn't enough community involvement in the grant proposals.
"Getting re-entry programs up and running is a tough nut to crack," says Ken Hales, director of Michigan's Bureau of Social Justice. "Re-entry is an area that has not had much focus."
Adds Hales, "It takes a high degree of collaboration with the criminal justice system, county social services, labor and housing to forge a relationship as a planning unit."
He then says pointedly: "These agencies don't usually work together."
In his speech, the president said his initiative "will provide transitional housing, and help newly released prisoners get mentoring, including from faith-based groups."
He ended his plea by saying, "America is the land of the second chance and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life."