Attorney General Holder Wants to Get Serious About Prison Reentry

by Colin Asher · 2010-07-15 05:39:00 UTC
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When Attorney General Eric Holder spoke this week at the annual government-backed Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) conference, his speech at first seemed nothing special. There was the requisite pablum about "how honored he was" to be there, and he thanked his audience for their attendance. There was a generic call for “innovative” methods. Then, onto a little chest-thumping about how well PSN was working. Blah, blah.

And then, snuck into the last third of Holder's speech was, that rarest of all public commodities: substance.

He began by talking about the need for law enforcement to be “responsive to research and analysis, and...pragmatic in determining how and where our resources can be used most effectively.” What's more, though, he also spoke eloquently about the fact that we can't simply arrest “our way out of the problem of violent crime.” Incarceration, he said, is not a “sole, economically sustainable, solution.”

Hear, hear.

The way forward? Getting serious about reentry programs, he said. Accordingly, the Justice Department will be distributing almost four times as much in reentry grants this year as last (still only $100 million, not nearly enough, but movement in the right direction). And that, Holder announced, is why he's established a Sentencing and Corrections Working Group, which is looking at federal sentencing practices in an attempt to determine how to better prepare federal prisoners for transition back into their communities.

Federal prosecutors must become “problem solvers” he said, “not simply case processors.” They must build or strengthen ties with local law enforcement and community groups, teachers, coaches and principals to deal with crime “holistically.”

And finally, he advocated “restoring scientific decision-making at the Justice Department,” calling it one of his highest priorities. Especially as cash-strapped states attempt to cut reentry programs across the country, his words are music to my ears.

Photo Credit: USDAgov

Colin Asher is a former social worker and award-winning freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, among many others.
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