New Bill Aims to Give Second Chances

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MICHEL MARTIN, host:

I'm Michel Martin, and this is Tell Me More from NPR News. Coming up, we're going to talk more about the Iraq hearings with two international journalists, who mainly serve an Arab audience. But first, we're going to talk about an important issue closer to home. It's a move to address this country's record incarceration rate. Today, President Bush is expected to sign the Second Chance Act. It's meant to help cut the numbers of people who return to prison by helping ex-offenders reintegrate into society. Mike Thompson is head of Justice Center at the Council of State Governments. His group has been a strong supporter of the Act and he's here with us to tell us more about it. Welcome, thanks so much for stopping in.

Mr. MIKE THOMPSON (Director, Justice Center): Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: Let's start with the basics. What exactly does the bill do?

Mr. THOMPSON: The bill authorizes about 165 million dollars in federal spending to help state and local governments improve the likelihood that people's transition from prison and jail to the community is successful.

MARTIN: You work at that Council of State Governments. Why are state governments so interested in this?

Mr. THOMPSON: This is a huge issue for state and local governments across the country and really for two reasons. One of the public safety implications of the growing numbers of people coming out of prison and jail and the second are the fiscal issues.

MARTIN: And what are the fiscal issues?

Mr. THOMPSON: The fiscal issues are enormous. The Pew Charitable Trusts recently reported about one in 100 adults today are in prison or jail on any given day, and that number is growing across the country. We look at different states across the country, for example the state of Michigan. Today, one out of every three people employed by the state works for the State Department of Corrections. In the state of Vermont, which went from spending about four percent of its budget in 1990, today closer to 10 percent of its state budget is spent on corrections. So that number is getting to be a larger and larger percentage of state spending, crowding out other items, and you get states across the country saying, you know, we can't continue to sustain this growth rate in our prison population. And they look at why their prison population is growing and a huge factor are failures for people who are released who are returning and then driving that growth. So some states, for example you take the state of Kansas, where nearly two out of every three people admitted to prison was somebody who was already under supervision of the criminal justice system.

MARTIN: And the coalition of people supporting this included a lot of other people, like the civil rights community, for example, has been alarmed by the fact that there are so many African-Americans, a disproportionate number of African-American's incarcerated, the impact on communities, on families, and so forth. But despite that, sort of the mantra over the last decade or longer has been, you know, get tough on crime. Incarcerate people, longer sentences, I mean, that's kind of the public dialogue we've been hearing. So what is it that you think got people to change their minds about this? And the other things that's noteworthy is that this bill got so much bipartisan support.

Mr. THOMPSON: It is. Iit's rare on criminal justice issues that we see people from the right and from the left all coming together, talking about something that makes terrific sense that's based on good research. That's exactly what we have with the Second Chance Act and the national interest in re-entry and whether it's law and order groups, corrections groups, local law enforcement, victim advocates, or people who are family members of people who are incarcerated, people coming out of prison themselves, or the different social service providers, or the civil rights communities you said, everybody agrees this is something that we need to do better on.

MARTIN: But the other argument has been one of the reasons that alternate visions of criminal justice have not been front and center in the last couple of years is that you can't win on that electorally, that that's a loser at the polls. I mean, are the people supporting this bill concerned that people who support it will be exposed politically as being soft on crime?

Mr. THOMPSON: I don't think so. I think that when you talk to the public and you say to them, knowing that people are going to come out of prison sooner or later, 95 percent of people are going to come out of prison no matter what, and you ask them do you want that person to come out knowing that they had a drug addiction, knowing that a significant percentage are illiterate, knowing that a significant percentage have a serious mental illness. When that person comes out and you're sitting next to them on a bus, or you're at the supermarket checkout line, do you want to know that that person has had the drug treatment that they need, has had the mental health services that they need, has gotten an education? Because right now the vast majority of those people aren't getting those services while they're incarcerated, and we know if they don't get those services, the likelihood of them re-offending increases out in the community. And I think everybody in the public understands, and certainly public opinion polls confirm this, that huge percentages of the public say this is the right thing to do and it's a tough on crime thing.

MARTIN: One other things that this bill seems to do is put rehabilitation back at the top of the agenda, or at least put it back in the mix as far as one of the goals of incarceration. Was there ever really a decision made to minimize rehabilitation as a goal, or did it just kind of happen?

Mr. THOMPSON: I think that what happened over the past couple of decades is that the number of people incarcerated grew very quickly in states across the country. States had to find the money to build and operate more and more prisons and jails and in order to find that money, oftentimes they would cut whatever kinds of programs existed behind the walls, whatever kinds of programs existed in the community in order to make sure they could build more beds and actually staff those prisons.

So I think, you know, you had this fiscal imperative to do whatever you could to make sure there was at least a place to warehouse somebody. And not everyone's starting to realize, hey wait a minute, with all those people incarcerated, we can't just simply incapacitate them for a couple of years and then put them back on the streets. We need to do something that's going to improve their rate of success because if we don't, the rates of return are going to be very high and then we have a fiscal problem and a public safety problem.

MARTIN: How quickly will states start to see the impact of this bill?

Mr. THOMPSON: You know, I think in states - very quickly you're going to see that as soon as they start improving the services that they're providing to people while they're incarcerated and are smarter about how they supervise people in the community, I think we can see very significant differences. In Kansas alone just in the past year, as a result of new programs that they've established and state legislation that's passed, they've seen a significant decline in the number of parolees who are returned to prison.

MARTIN: Mike Thompson is Director of the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments and he was kind enough to join us here in the studio in Washington. Mike, thank you so much.

Mr. THOMSPON: Thanks for having me.

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