From Brennan Center for Justice:
This essay is part of the Brennan Center’s series examining the punitive excess that has come to define America’s criminal legal system.
Imagine one of those dystopian movies in which some character inhabits a world marked by dehumanization and a continual state of fear, neglect, and physical violence — The Hunger Games, for instance, or Mad Max. Now imagine that the people living in those worlds return to ours to become your neighbors. After such brutal traumatization, is it any wonder that they might struggle to obtain stable housing or employment, manage mental illness, deal with conflict, or become a better spouse or parent?
This is no fantasy world. American prisons cage millions of human beings in conditions similar to those movies. Of the more than 1.5 million people incarcerated in American prisons in 2019, more than 95 percent will be released back into the community at some point, at a rate of around 600,000 people each year. Given those numbers, we should ensure that those in our prisons come home better off, not worse — for their sake, but for society’s as well.
Yet our prisons fail miserably at preparing people for a law-abiding and successful life after release. A long-term study of recidivism rates of people released from state prisons from 2005 to 2014 found that 68 percent were arrested within three years and 83 percent were arrested within nine years following their release. And evidence confirms the great irony of our American criminal justice system: the longer someone spends in “corrections,” the less likely they are to stay out of jail or prison after their release. The data tells us that people are spending more time in prisons and the longest prison terms just keep getting longer, and thus our system of mass incarceration all but assures high rates of recidivism. Continue reading >>>
|
|
|
|
