Getting Out and Staying Out

Parole is an important facet of a functioning criminal justice system. If someone has committed a violent crime or multiple crimes and served time in prison, we need a system of state supervision to ensure that they are fit for release. Like the rest of our system in the U.S., however, the parole system is badly broken and tilts far too strongly toward treating every problem with a single solution - reincarceration.

I often advocate on this blog for treatment over incarceration and for shorter sentences paired with job training, counseling and support to help people rebuild lives and avoid criminal activity. A functioning parole system is an essential part of this vision for a better system, and we do not have that system in place today. More than half a million people are released from prison and jail each year, and about 70% of them will return within three years. This is often not for a new crime, but a parole violation. Something is wrong with this picture.

I recently saw Goro Toshima's excellent documentary film "A Hard Straight" - a touching portrait of three people released from prison in California and struggling to stay free under the harsh conditions of their parole. Aaron Shepard, above, served a 1-year sentence in San Quentin for an accessory to armed robbery conviction. He has since served more than eight years on parole violations. Some of these violations were for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time - his parole violations mandated that he live in San Francisco, but with little money he ended up in high-crime neighborhoods where he was arrested for drug involvement simply for being in the vicinity of a drug crime.

Berkeley Prof. Jonathan Simon, who has studied parole and recidivism extensively, spoke about parole reform in a two-part interview last week on the UC website. He pointed to the one-size-fits-all parole system as a big problem:

Unlike many other states that also eliminated early release through parole, California continued to require parole supervision in the community for all released prisoners. And that, I think, is a big part of what's broken. People are sent to California prisons for a determinate amount of time, based upon the seriousness of their crime. After they've served this sentence, it's neither justified nor effective to add up to three years of parole supervision for each and every ex-offender — without making any distinction between those whose criminal record or psychological profile suggest they'll commit a crime that will harm the community, and those who pose no such threat.

So the parole system has little real capacity to monitor and protect us from those who pose a danger of committing serious new crimes. And it exposes ex-offenders — many of whom pose little threat of committing such crimes — to the likelihood of being sent back to prison. (This is a really big problem, when you think of our prison overcrowding and our budget crisis).

Simon goes on to say that this is an exciting time for criminal justice reform, with the mix of budget awareness, overcrowding and an environment ripe for change at the federal level. But something else he said about the causes of our high recidivism rate stuck with me as well:

Increasingly the people in our prisons are basically outside the labor market, whether or not they're locked up. So when they return to the community from prison, they aren't going back to jobs. Most are unemployed and many are homeless; some don't even have families to go back to. In that kind of situation, trying to manage people by periodically checking up on them doesn't make any sense. It really can't work — which you'll see if you look at the category of parolees who are simply of unknown whereabouts.

This reminded me of something another man named Simon said recently. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, spoke recently with Bill Moyers (if you missed this interview, drop what you're doing and watch it now. It's a must-watch whether you're a fan of The Wire or not):

The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It's the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. And we don't, as we said before, economically, we don't need those people. The American economy doesn't need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we're willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. I don't think - since we basically have become a market-based culture and it's what we know, and it's what's led us to this sad denouement, I think we're going to follow market-based logic, right to the bitter end.

It's a sad fact but it's our reality, and Simon's observation shows that it's not just changing our laws that will end the disparity in our criminal justice system and society as a whole. We need to change the kind of opportunities we create.