This weekend, the last of prisoners granted reduced sentences under a federal reform plan will be released. But advocates say the government continues to overlook and ignore ex-convicts
Although senators, the president, police and prosecutors have joined the push for criminal justice reform, activists and former prisoners have urged them to look beyond “the front-end” of minimum mandatory sentences for certain crimes, and to create and improve re-entry programs for the men and women who are often overwhelmed by life outside prison.
The issue of what happens to prisoners returning to society will be brought into sharp relief this weekend, the deadline for release of 6,000 federal prisoners who were granted reduced sentences by the US Sentencing Commission. The Commission reviewed tens of thousands of petitions in an effort to curtail strict and expensive drug laws. About a third of the prisoners entered the country illegally and will be deported, and some of the remainder have already moved to halfway houses or home confinement in recent months.
The transitional homes – some trial programs, some for-profit – are meant to help former prisoners through the perils and obstacles of re-entry, which are laid bare in statistics and interviews with activists and former prisoners.
“People face enormous challenges just acclimating to society,” said Michael Santos, a former federal prisoner who now lectures at San Francisco State University and runs a podcast on incarceration. He then rattled off the challenges to restarting life with a criminal record: work, housing, transport, technology, basic ID and perhaps the most daunting – adjusting to society in general.
“These people have never seen a smartphone, won’t have an email address, they’ve learned never to smile,” Santos said. “I’m telling you this as somebody who was in prison 26 years, this will be extraordinarily difficult if they don’t have a plan.”
Ronnie Massaro, another former prisoner of more than 20 years, was puzzled by everything from online job applications to the appearance of buttons on a gas pump. Over four years free, Massaro occasionally joins Santos’ lectures, telling students: “I can go into any prison right now and within 10 minutes I’m going to know everybody, what’s the scheme, how the power structure works. Out here, I still don’t know how to live.”
More than 550 federal prisoners will be released into California, which holds about 56,000 federal inmates and 112,300 state inmates – 135.8% of its prisons’ capacity. State prisoners are dropped off at the nearest bus station with $200 on a cash card, and left to fend for themselves.
“These individuals have not used a bus in years,” said Jared Rudolph, an attorney who founded the Prisoner Reentry Network in northern California, “and now they have to buy tickets, find directions home, and use this card when they’ve been locked up since before credit cards.”
Joe Calderon, a 45-year-old who served almost 20 years and now works at Transitions Clinic in San Francisco, the bureaucracy was compounded by
prejudices “far and wide”.
“You don’t always necessarily see the face of the beast, you only see the actions of it. So you don’t get the job, you don’t get the apartment, you don’t get the credit or healthcare. And it affects you economically, your health, your mental health.”
The Sentencing Commission reduced penalties for many drug offenses in April 2014, and later that year announced the new rules could apply retroactively. Federal judges soon started reviewing prisoners’ petitions and their history of behavior while in prison, and the 6,000 due for release between 30 October and 2 November are the first whose applications were accepted.
Deputy attorney general Sally Yates has called the new rules “a step toward these necessary reforms” in drug laws, but the reform advocates say that the federal government continues to overlook and ignore ex-convicts after release.
Rudolph said the first weeks and months after release are critical to prevent former inmates from slipping back into the system, but many are frustrated by the same bureaucracy meant to help them up.
“Guys don’t get birth certificates for months, face huge delays for driver’s licenses,” he said. “They go into social security offices and hear, ‘No, man, you’re dead, you don’t exist. I don’t know who you say you are but you’re not in the computer.’ Agencies do not consider re-entry. It’s a bottleneck of poverty.”
Nationally, about 68% of former prisoners are re-arrested within three years, and 76% re-arrested within five years, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Former prisoners are also 3.5 times more likely to die than the average American, according to a 2007 medical study, and a Columbia University study found that 65% of inmates suffer substance abuse addiction but only 11% receive any treatment.
Most of the newly released prisoners – more than 2,100 – will be freed in Texas, where transition programs are trying to recruit volunteers and staffers in anticipation of a growing caseload.
Nearly 900 prisoners will be released in Florida this weekend, about a third to the central region where Kevin Gay, the founder of a re-entry program that finds work for inmates, operates from Jacksonville. The program, Operation New Hope, acts as mediator between the state, ex-prisoners and employers, training the former inmates and tracking each of their successes, weaknesses and failures in a database.
The program now helps about 500 former prisoners a year, Gay said – a fraction of the 10,000 ex-offenders released every week – starting in prison and through the first overwhelming year.
“I once took a guy who was in for 16 years to a PF Chang,” Gay said, referring to the Chinese restaurant chain, “and the whole thing – the automatic doors, the sensors for the bathroom sink and towels – he couldn’t believe it. He just turned to me and said: ‘The world has passed me by.’”
Gay argues that work and its byproducts help, saying that ex-prisoners are better able to pay childcare, reconnect with families and rebuild law-abiding lives with even just a few dollars more than minimum wage.
“In their first year guys will try hard, do odd jobs, but fail to gain traction and give up, and a lot go back to small stuff like selling pot,” he said. “Nobody’s ever told them to treat a job at McDonald’s like a stepping stone, or that it’s as simple as showing up on time, doing things right.”
Fewer than 10% of ex-prisoners with work through New Hope are re-arrested in their first year out, according to the program, though that figure roughly doubles in the second year after release. He said he said he was heartened by the new bipartisan push for reform, but that the system needed overhaul from front to back.
“We’ve been dealing with poverty, mental health, social issues, like they’re criminal justice issues,” he said.
And despite the successes of many participants, the stigma of incarceration still takes its toll, Gay said, recalling how a friend once burst into his office, sobbing, after losing a new job.
The woman, 62, had been convicted at 17 for prostitution and has spent decades without arrest or citation, doing social work. Her would-be employers had learned of the prison time and terminated her contract, but she said it wasn’t being jobless that bothered her. Instead. she said, it was a realization: “America doesn’t forgive.”
