Record numbers of ex-cons return to Illinois streets:  More people ask how to help them adjust
 

Having served their time, they come back to Chicago in staggering numbers: hundreds who've murdered and robbed; thousands of one-time thieves and burglars; nearly 10,000 who've dealt drugs or used them. About 21,000 inmates will leave the high-fenced borders of Illinois prisons this year and re-enter society within the city limits, enough ex-offenders to fill the United Center, about 10 city bus-loads rolling in each week.

This population returns with little notice or fanfare, most drifting almost invisibly back to the neighborhoods where they found trouble in the first place. From January 2004 to the end of May this year, 27,944 people were released to Chicago. Already, 6,405--nearly 23 percent--are back in prison.

There's a reason for that. Most of these inmates are leaving with a bus pass and a few bucks, taking limited skills and a criminal record and jumping the chasm between a cell and law-abiding society.

Over the last three decades, America has largely given up on rehabilitating its prisoners, all the while watching prison populations across the country swell to unheard-of levels. In 1972, about 200,000 people occupied the country's state and federal prisons. That number is now about 1.4 million.

As "get tough on crime" became a political mantra throughout the '70s, '80s and '90s, the nation's corrections system grew, but its ability to help inmates better themselves and prepare for life outside the gates was shrunk intentionally. Officials stopped believing criminals could be reformed, and money for treatment and education programs was taken away, often used to build more prisons.

The result is a prison system that costs $60 billion a year to operate, up from $9 billion in 1982. Illinois alone pours $1.3 billion into corrections annually, roughly $100 per year for each resident of the state, young and old. For more than a decade, Medicaid and corrections have been the only two areas in which states have increased spending.

A poor success rate

Despite the cost, the success rate of the nation's corrections system is poor: Nationally, about two-thirds of the more than 600,000 ex-convicts coming out in 2005 will be re-arrested within three years, and about half will return to prison for a new crime or violation of parole.

While it was once politically taboo to speak of providing resources for prisoners, these figures have brought many lawmakers across the country, both liberal and conservative, to the same conclusion: The nation's corrections system is correcting very little.

"Obviously with recidivism at 67 percent, we're not doing a very good job," said Joe Weedon, director of government affairs at the American Correctional Association. "And something needs to change."

Many would say Terrence Johnson's life is emblematic of the prison system's flaws. On Friday morning, the South Side Chicagoan left an Illinois prison for the fifth time in his 38 years.

He had just finished serving 2 years of a 6-year sentence for possession of a stolen vehicle, and he walked out the gates at Logan Correction Center in Lincoln, Ill., with the same optimism he has had each time he became a free man. This, he says, will be the time I straighten my life out.

Slim prospects

Johnson faults no one but himself for his inability to keep that promise. But about the only help he has ever had re-entering society has been a busy parole agent, and his job prospects now are as slim as ever.

What was lost in the race to incarcerate was the fact that 95 percent of those who get locked up, people just like Johnson, eventually come out. And once they're out--often no more educated or prepared to join the workforce and always bearing the black mark of a felony conviction--they're less likely than before to find ways to make an honest living, presenting a sizable risk to public safety.

"Every time I get out, I feel hopeful," Johnson said Friday as he waited in green prison-issued sweat pants and a white T-shirt for a Greyhound north to Chicago. "Until I start hearing a lot of, `No, we're not hiring.' It gets so hard after a while. I'll do anything, anything, but nobody will hire me because of my record. You have to find a way to live. And that can lead you back to crime."

More than half of Illinois' 44,524 prisoners are either repeat offenders or parole violators. That means thousands of additional crimes are being committed by people who were, in theory, supposed to have been rehabilitated.

"In a sense, imprisonment may be creating more crime," said Arthur Lurigio, a criminologist at Loyola University Chicago, noting that first-time offenders locked up with hardened criminals tend to pick up more pointers in prison than they do life skills. "Our system is not set up to prevent crime. It's set up to perpetuate it."

Some disagree with Lurigio and point to the fact that from 1993 to 2000, as prisons were filling up, the rate of both violent crime and property crime dropped 44 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Others argue that even if prisoners are given additional resources, there's no proof they can be reformed. David Farabee, a research psychologist at UCLA and author of the book "Rethinking Rehabilitation," says prisoner rehabilitation programs have never been proven effective, and reviews of such programs are often manipulated to produce favorable results.
 

"The majority [of programs] are never evaluated," he said. "Of those that are evaluated, the strongest support for those programs comes from the lowest quality studies."

But many in the corrections field are convinced drug treatment and education can keep ex-offenders out of prison. A 1997 study by the U.S. Department of Education found that just attending school while in prison can cut reincarceration nearly 30 percent, and other reports have found recidivism rates for inmates who take college-level courses can dip below 20 percent.

A push for change

The realities of the country's prison system have sparked a movement to improve "prisoner re-entry," a buzzword that's been on the lips of politicians from coast to coast.

Last year, Gov. Rod Blagojevich reopened the 1,300-person Sheridan Correctional Center in LaSalle County, turning it into the country's first prison focused specifically on drug treatment, education and job preparation.

Democratic Congressman Danny Davis of Chicago and Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas are pushing a federal bill called the Second Chance Act that would provide more than $100 million for prisoner re-entry programs nationwide.

The city of Chicago has earmarked $4 million from the Chicago Skyway lease to enhance prisoner re-entry initiatives over the next five years.

Texas lawmakers are considering more than $80 million for alternatives to prison for non-violent offenders.

Connecticut shortened prison terms for some non-violent offenders and used the money it saves to create programs that help communities that produce the most criminals.

Cheri Nolan, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department, said the department is closely watching what states across the country are doing, hopeful these new ideas provide an answer for a system that clearly is not working.

Derrick Hendricks is intimately familiar with the system. He's 26, grew up in Cabrini-Green and was released from prison March 8 after serving a 7-month sentence for drug possession. It was his third trip to prison on drug charges.

Each time he has been released, the only preparation Hendricks got was a 15-hour program called "Pre-Start," which touches on anger management, job searches and parole rules.

When he left the Lincoln Correctional Center, he was given a bus ticket back to Chicago and a pamphlet with the numbers of a couple of agencies that help ex-offenders find jobs. His only support network upon return, he says, was a parole officer whose advice was, "Get a job."

Hendricks knows how to do construction work, says he has filled out job applications across the city and is desperate to get away from the stress and danger of the street. He's willing to take any job, he says, as long as it pays the bills. But so far nothing has worked out.

Trying to survive

"That's why I keep going back, because I can't find a job," he said. "The streets are my job. Everything I get locked up for is dealing with my trying to survive."

Studies estimate about one in five of the 600,000 ex-offenders leaving prison this year will have served their entire sentence and will thus be under no formal supervision.

This massive flow of ex-offenders is not something lawmakers gave much thought to when they were filling up prisons and building more. What they wanted, and got, was a drop in the crime rate.

But a number of criminologists and other researchers say the crime drop can't be tied directly to the increase in prison populations. Other factors were at play, including a booming economy in the '90s, the stabilization of the country's crack cocaine markets, better police efforts to get guns off the streets and increased vigilance by community members.

Michael Jacobson, president of the Vera Institute of Justice and author of the book "Downsizing Prisons," studied data nationally and found several examples that showed little correlation between incarceration and crime. For example, from 1992 to 2002, violent crime in New York state fell by 53 percent, while the prison population increased 9 percent. In West Virginia during the same time, crime increased by 10 percent, while the prison population skyrocketed 171 percent.
 

Still, some experts warn against a sudden swing toward idealistic rehabilitation programs.

Douglas Marlowe is director of the Section on Criminal Justice Research at the Treatment Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. He believes the country's approach to incarceration swings like a pendulum between two extremes, one being punitive, the other rehabilitative.

He said there's no evidence that either extreme works.

"All of our solutions have been simplistic," Marlowe said. "What we really need is an integration of the best of both of these worlds, so people receive services and treatment, but they are held carefully and closely to monitor their behavior."

In 2004's State of the Union address, President Bush brought up the issue of prisoner re-entry, a watershed moment for those who had long disagreed with the country's "lock 'em up and throw away the key" approach to criminals.

`The land of second chance'

"America," the president declared, "is the land of second chance, and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life."

Such comments from any politician, much less a conservative Republican president, flew in the face of more than three decades of stern rhetoric.

In the late 1960s, spurred by a rise in violent crime, a burgeoning drug culture and the civil unrest surrounding the war in Vietnam, Americans began adopting a tougher attitude toward criminals.

Many experts trace the popularization of the movement to get tough on crime to Richard Nixon. In 1967, the year before he was elected president, Nixon wrote in an essay that appeared in Reader's Digest that America had become "the most lawless and violent [nation] in the history of free peoples." Such statements were common throughout his campaign and presidency, setting the stage for countless politicians to run on law-and-order platforms.

In 1974, Robert Martinson, a sociologist, released a study of prison programs aimed at rehabilitating inmates. He concluded that prisoners could not be rehabilitated, and his study launched a catchphrase, "nothing works," that spelled the end of the rehabilitative approach to incarceration.

Politicians eager to appear tough on crime and save money began pulling programs from prisons and seeking tougher sentences for offenders. In 1979, Martinson produced a follow-up study in which he backed away from his previous claims and said well-structured rehabilitative programs could be successful. That study, however, received little attention, while the sociologist's "nothing works" conclusions carried on for years.

By the late 1970s, the nation's incarceration rate, which had held nearly steady for four decades, had begun to increase. In the 1980s, it exploded.

Taking the tough-on-crime approach to a new level, President Ronald Reagan declared a war on drugs. This resulted in thousands of new felony convictions, and with those convictions came steeper sentences and fewer chances for early release.

Many corrections officials saw flaws in the tougher sentencing laws and watched as their prisons filled with inmates who faced longer sentences and knew that even good behavior wouldn't get them out any sooner.

"We knew it wasn't going to work," said Joe Lehman, former head of corrections in Washington and current president of the International Association of Reentry.

In 1994, the government made prison inmates ineligible for Pell Grants, student aid funds that helped many offenders take college courses while in prison. In 1982, more than 350 college-degree programs were available in prisons across the country. Within a decade, fewer than a dozen existed.

Some prisons would later get rid of exercise equipment, fearing inmates would use it to increase their strength and fighting ability. They started locking prisoners down for longer periods of time, and some states even brought back chain gangs.

In the late 1990s, legislators and researchers looked up and saw the results of two decades of mass incarceration. The prison population had grown to 1.3 million in 1999 from about 320,000 in 1980.

A revolving door

In 1997, the Justice Department released a study that shook the corrections world: Despite all the tough laws, two-thirds of the people leaving the country's prisons were being rearrested within three years of their release.

To make matters worse, the number of inmates being released had gone through the roof.

In 1998, 561,000 inmates were returned to their communities, a massive jump from the 170,000 that got out in 1980. With such high rearrest rates, it became clear to many the U.S. prison system had become little more than a revolving door, and cities and towns across the country were not prepared to handle the flood of ex-offenders.

"For a variety of reasons, the policy conversation from the '70s to the late '90s was remarkably myopic," said Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and an expert on re-entry. "Myopic in the sense that as we continued to invest in prisons as our predominant response to crime, we conveniently overlooked the fact that almost everyone we send to prison eventually comes back."

In 2000, in a speech at John Jay College, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno acknowledged that the prison problems were recognized at the highest levels.

"They come into prisons without life skills, without a job or an anticipated job," Reno said. "They come with so little chance of getting off on the right foot, unless we do it the right way."

About that time, incremental changes started taking place. In some states, sentencing laws for drug offenders were scaled back, and some non-violent inmates had their sentences reduced. Community programs that had long struggled to help ex-offenders began getting state and federal funding so they could do more.

Then came Bush's State of the Union address, which opened the door for politicians to speak freely about this issue.

"What that said to me was, Democrat or Republican, left or right, it's OK to talk about offender re-entry," said Reginald Wilkinson, head of Ohio's prison system and a longtime advocate of improving prisoner re-entry policies. "That it's not some `get soft on crime' initiative."

A mood of hopefulness

While most ex-offenders in Illinois and elsewhere are still leaving prison with precious few resources and dim prospects for employment, there is a mood of hopefulness among corrections officials that change is under way.

Deirdre Battaglia, warden at Illinois' Stateville prison, says the state's wardens have been encouraged to forge new approaches that will better prepare inmates for release. She has seen the tough-on-crime attitude changing and believes reforms will--and must--be made.

"We have to, while we have them behind the wall, correct their behavior," Battaglia said. "That's why we're called the Department of Corrections.

"It's to everyone's benefit to try to effect changes with another human being. And that's what they are--human beings."

Helping ex-convicts to stay straight

Steps the state and the city of Chicago are taking to keep ex-offenders from returning to prison:

- In 2004, Gov. Rod Blagojevich turned the Sheridan Correctional Center in LaSalle County into a prison focused specifically on drug treatment, education and job preparation. Once inmates are released, they receive extensive case management to help them find jobs and settle into crime-free and drug-free lives. This model is being watched closely by corrections officials across the country.

- Under Operation Spotlight, the state is working to reduce the caseload of parole agents by as much as a half and put a greater emphasis on agents helping parolees find work. About 100 agents have been added, and the Illinois Department of Corrections says the number of new crimes committed by parolees in fiscal year 2005 was the lowest since 1989.

- This year, the Statewide Community Safety & Re-entry Working Group was formed and has held meetings across the state to develop a plan to help prepare ex-offenders to return to society. Recommendations are to be given to the governor by January.

- The city of Chicago is using $4 million in proceeds from the Chicago Skyway lease to improve prisoner re-entry initiatives over the next five years.

- The Mayor's Office of Workforce Development launched a pilot jobs program for ex-offenders that will help 60 people find work in the hospitality and warehousing industries.

- The city has given about $260,000 to the North Lawndale Employment Network to help fund three programs that will help ex-offenders with job training.