We continue to allow wide disparities in sentencing, and we now are beginning to see the result of decisions made in the past two decades. Reentry, the reintegration of ex-offenders back into their communities, has been the concern of parole agents, parole boards, those concerned with corrections policy, and, of course, ex-offenders, their families, and the communities to which they return. In its latest incarnation reentry became the concern of Attorney General Janet Reno and her then–National Institute of Justice director (and now the president of John Jay College in New York City), Jeremy Travis. They, along with some forward-looking researchers and some concerned community activists at the time, were the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” or, in more modern terminology, an “early warning system.” Reno and Travis focused the lens of government and think tanks on the provocative question, What happens to individuals as they leave custody? They began to direct the resources and energy of government toward the question of reentry. Foundations, states, nonprofits, and local communities all began to identify the successful reintegration of large numbers of individuals from prison and jail as central to the survival of many neighborhoods.
In recognition of the bold steps that Attorney General Reno and Jeremy Travis took to reignite the discussion of reentry, I now add my voice to the debate. Reentry, race, and politics are intimately intertwined and will remain so unless those of us who have seen the impact of our inaction speak of its devastating consequences. In this book I begin each chapter with an anecdote as an attempt to illustrate the individual and personal consequences of our reentry policy. The first chapter is an overview of the effects of race and stigma. Even without using the lens of the criminal justice system, it is easy to see that we in this country have not resolved some of the fundamental conflicts in our notions of equality and the ways in which use of discretion continues to be corrupted by stereotyping and racial bias. In chapter 2, I try to identify the central ways in which the media and politics have contributed to and exacerbated the problem.
In addition to the increased media coverage of race, crime, and parolees in the 1990s was the simplification of the description of the problem. The notion that crime fighting is simple was articulated by a number of commentators proffering that “[t]here’s no secret to fighting crime,” suggesting that the only things needing to be done were to “hire more police, build more prisons, abolish parole, stop winking at juvenile criminals, severely enforce public-nuisance laws, permit self-defense for the law-abiding and put deliberate murderers to death.”7 Simplistic notions highlighted by the media only led to simplistic policy decisions on the part of legislators. The effects of these longer, harsher sentences were to reduce programming in prisons and create additional obstacles to reentry.
In the third chapter of the book, I look at how women have become the new fodder for the mass incarceration effort. Although some of the most important criminal justice research completed in the last two decades has brought our attention to the disproportionate representation of men of color in prison, it has largely ignored the fact that women of color are being arrested, charged, and incarcerated at alarming rates. Part of this chapter also examines the consequences to children and other aspects of community cohesion that are affected by this phenomenon.
The next three chapters of the book sketch out some of the fundamental needs of ex-offenders upon release: housing, health care, and employment. These chapters also focus on the ways in which segregation, policy decisions, and bias conspire to make reentry particularly difficult for people of color given the current socioeconomic and political realities in this country. Those chapters attempt to paint a picture of what an offender must overcome to attempt to reintegrate into his or her community.
In the final three substantive chapters I look at governmental responses to reentry. After an unfair, political, and media-driven attack on the entire parole profession, in response to which the industry has tried to reinvent itself, parole officers have moved from having once been the primary source for referrals to employment and social services to fulfilling a more surveillance-oriented law enforcement adjunct role. However, in recent years we are beginning to see some retreat from this enforcement focus as more officers rediscover the importance of corrections and parole participating in community justice efforts.
These chapters also explore the complicated and ill-conceived “tough on crime” politics that have created a web of collateral consequences to incarceration that further hinder the reentry of ex-offenders. Individuals who have been arrested and incarcerated have become the pariahs who continue to be denied many of the fundamental rights of citizenship despite having paid their debt to society. Seemingly no consequence is too harsh for consideration as an obstacle to reentry.
Finally, in these chapters on government’s response to reentry, I analyze the use of courts in the reintegration of ex-felons into their communities. Building on the well-researched and well-documented success of drug courts, new specialized “treatment courts” have emerged as the most recent cure-all for criminal justice problems. Notwithstanding the fact that there is little research to validate the claims that courts can correct the range of ills they purport to address, politicians and policy makers have promoted the use of courts principally because courts provide them with a degree of political cover. By providing services under the supervision of the courts, they gain a means of coercion, a way to force individual compliance. So, reentry courts have begun to appear. For communities of color, where social services have been cut over the last two decades, we are seeing a reemergence of these services, though provided in coordination with and at the added expense of the criminal justice system.
I do not want this book to be reduced to a simple racial critique of criminal justice policy mistakes that are made in the name of being “tough on crime.” Rather, it is my hope to underscore the way race and bad policy have constructed seemingly insurmountable reentry barriers. In the concluding chapter I challenge the notion that the so-called crime problem must be cast as a race problem. As a nation we have the will to make the necessary course correction, to provide an opportunity for people who have paid their debt to society and only seek an equal chance to become full citizens again.
1
Reentry, Race, and Stigma
A young man’s life went off track early. Among other crimes, he raped and robbed a young woman in her home. The crimes cost him sixteen years in prison, which was time he certainly had earned. Released, he returned home and for three years tried to piece together a life for himself and to raise a family. At thirty-seven years of age, it might be said that the man, Lane Mikaloff, was redeeming himself and was finally doing precisely what society demanded of him.
Shortly after he returned home, however, Mikaloff learned from the sheriff’s office that as a registered sex offender, he could no longer live in the house to which he had returned. It was located too close to a school. Living there would violate a state law prohibiting convicted sex offenders from residing within one thousand feet of a school.
Society expected Mikaloff to embark on a path of personal redemption. At a minimum, this meant that Mikaloff should support himself and live as a productive member of his community. The grand promise behind the criminal justice process is that once an individual pays his or her debt to society, he or she can reintegrate into society. But, as Mikaloff learned, society erects barriers to that reintegration.
Mikaloff was a sex offender, which means that he fell into the class of criminals least likely to garner any sympathy. Yet, even those individuals who have engaged in the worst deeds can and often do genuinely renounce their criminal paths. Perhaps then they deserve an opportunity to outlive their pasts and to overcome the stigma of a criminal record.1
The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of people incarcerated in the United States. By 2001, approximately two million men and women resided in state and federal prisons and jails.2 Although other communities of color suffered the effects of this increased incarceration (as described later in this work), this dramatic rise in incarceration had a particularly catastrophic