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Obama Administration Seeks to Curb Inmates’ Return to Prison Obama Administration Seeks to Curb Inmates’ Return to Prison
(about 11 hours later)
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is releasing on Monday what it calls a “road map for re-entry” to help stem the cycle of recidivism for tens of thousands of inmates who leave prison only to return soon after for committing new offenses. WASHINGTON — The Obama administration made a renewed push on Monday to ease the path back to society for freed prisoners and stem a cycle in which hundreds of thousands return to prison not long after they leave.
The plan promises a new federal focus on job training and substance-abuse programs while inmates are incarcerated to prepare them for life outside prison, as well as closer monitoring of their transition once they are released. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, in a speech in Philadelphia, said that “too often, Americans who have paid their debt to society leave prison only to find that they continue to be punished for past mistakes,” with jobs, housing, voting rights and even such basics as a driver’s license hard to find.
It also seeks to make it easier for released prisoners to get state IDs as a path to employment. She laid out steps to address the problem, including a push for states to allow newly released federal inmates to trade their prisoner identifications for a state-issued ID.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch will announce details of the plan on Monday afternoon at an appearance in Philadelphia with community leaders. But the plan included little new funding, with $1.75 million in federal grants spread among 18 housing and community service programs nationwide to help incarcerated juveniles find jobs and housing once they are released.
But while the plan sets high goals for the return of about 600,000 state and federal prisoners each year to society, it includes no new funding for the effort. When Ms. Lynch addressed the recidivism problem last year, she announced a much larger commitment of federal funding: $53 million in “second-chance” grants for groups working with freed inmates to prevent a return to prison.
The announcement is the latest in a series of steps that the Obama administration has taken to reduce prison time and ease policies for lower-level offenders, focusing resources instead on what it calls the “hardest criminals.” “We’re doing what we can,” Kevin S. Lewis, the press secretary for the attorney general, said of the new round of grants. “We could always use more, but we’re using the resources we have and that Congress has given us.”
The announcement was the latest in a yearslong campaign by President Obama and his Justice Department to put in place what he says are fairer and more effective policies for lower-level offenders, typically those incarcerated on drug-related offenses.
The administration has taken a number of steps on its own, like banning solitary confinement for juveniles in federal custody and granting early releases to thousands of drug offenders. In Congress, efforts to ease criminal sentencing laws more broadly have run into roadblocks, but advocates remain hopeful.
In her visit to Philadelphia, Ms. Lynch met with a group of men and women who told of the difficulties in trying to start over after leaving prison.
“Their stories offered a powerful reminder that even for those who have long been on the right track, a criminal history can make it enormously difficult to turn the page,” she said.
Recent studies show just how intractable a problem recidivism has been among the roughly 600,000 state and federal inmates released each year.
According to a study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics tracking data for a five-year period ending in 2010, about two-thirds of all offenders incarcerated in state systems were arrested for a new crime within three years, and more than three-quarters were arrested within five years.
For federal inmates, the numbers were only moderately more encouraging. Nearly half of all the freed inmates were rearrested within eight years for a new crime or for violating conditions of their release, according to a separate study last month by the United States Sentencing Commission.
Ms. Lynch, a longtime prosecutor, said the idea of allowing freed federal inmates to trade their prisoner identifications for state-issued IDs would carry a powerful practical and symbolic impact, and she wrote to all 50 governors to ask them to work with the Justice Department to put the initiative in place.
She said such a move “would eliminate one of the most common — and most harmful — barriers to re-entry across the United States.”
“But even more important,” she added, “is the message that such a program would send to returning citizens: that they are welcome back into society; that their government is invested in their success; and that they can now — quite literally — exchange their old identity as a federal inmate for a fresh start.”
In what she called a “road map to re-entry,” Ms. Lynch also promised a new federal focus on job training and mental health and substance abuse programs to better prepare inmates for the outside world, as well as closer monitoring of their transition through halfway houses and other supervised settings once they are released.
She also announced steps to encourage inmates to interact with family members as a way of deterring a return to crime once they are released.