Jobs Not Jails rally with Occupy Poughkeepsie folks-- all out-- each one reach one!...

Hi all...

[scroll down just a bit for specifics from Manna Jo on tomorrow's rally]

Miss this from front page of Friday's paper?...(why we have no time to lose re: fighting jail expansion!):

"Dutchess County Executive Marcus Molinaro said he was convinced the county had "reached a critical mass," making some form of jail expansion imperative." [!!!!!]
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20120210/NEWS01/302100027/Molinaro-vows-keep-an-eye-spending

See http://www.JobsNotJails.weebly.com -- jail expansion is NOT necessary-- scroll down for facts below; email countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us, countyexec@co.dutchess.ny.us-- pass it on!]

Fact: W.W. Smith Humanities Magnet Elementary School shut its doors in 2010 in Poughkeepsie.

Fact: Cuomo proposes cut-- $99 million from early childhood intervention services over next 5 years.
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Details-of-Cuomo-s-budget-proposal-2593571.php ]

Fact: Kindergarten has already been cut down to being just a half-day in the City of Poughkeepsie;

Fact: Dutchess GOP Co. Leg. majority already eliminated Youth Bureau's Project Return program for troubled teens (see below: more on this-- used to keep kids in program: $26.day-- not in jail: $700/day).

Also-- re: Michelle Alexander's New Jim Crow below-- see http://www.NewJimCrow.com ; on radio--
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/13/on_eve_of_mlk_day_michelle (Democracy Now);
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/16/145175694/legal-scholar-jim-crow-still-exists-in-america (NPR):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-alexander/the-new-jim-crow_b_454469.html .

[also see: http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/02/jobs-not-jails-born-help-us-carry-work.html ;
http://www.dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/08/pok-forum-sat-john-chaney-from.htm ;
and read http://www.thenation.com/article/end-war-crime?page=full -- Dutchess needs these initiatives!]

Hope to see y'all out there with us tomorrow!...

[pass it on]

Joel
444-0599/876-2488
joeltyner@earthlink.net
JoelforCongress.org


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From: Rosendale Town Boardmember Manna Jo Greene (mannajo@aol.com)


Subject: Jobs Not Jails--all hands aboard Weds. Feb. 15 Dutchess Co.Office Bldg 5:30 p.m


Date: Feb 13, 2012 11:27 AM

Hi to all.

We had a very productive meeting this Saturday and agreed hold to a vigil in front of the Dutchess County office building [at 22 Market St. in Poughkeepsie] this Weds, evening, Feb. 15 at 5:30 p.m. with our Jobs Not Jails banner to be highly visible as legislators are arriving for the unusually scheduled meeting (due to Presidents Day the following Monday being a holiday). Please come out and bring others.

[note from me (JT) on this: Co. Leg. caucus starts at 6 pm; also good for folks to speak @ 7 pm mtg. too!]


Our next Jobs Not Jails meeting will be held o Sat. Feb. 25th at 10:30 am [details TBA].


We are planning to arrange a meeting with Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro, and the Sheriff, and others regarding our position that Dutchess funding should be going to Jobs, Not Jails.-- job creation and retention, education, prison prevention, reform, successful rehabilitation and reentry, to addressing housing needs and youth programs and to restoring education, including pre-K and kindergarten, GED, etc.

Wesley is reaching out to Bar Association to see if there can be more pro bono legal help to relieve the backlog of people incarcerated awaiting trial; Francena to Northern and Southern Dutchess NAACP; Manna to Community Voices Heard.


Many thanks to all, and hope to see you on Weds. at 5:30 at the County Office Building.

Here is a relevant excerpt from The New Jim Crow:

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander, pp 60, 99, 100


Convictions for drug offenses are the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration rates in the United States. Drug offenses alone account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000. Approximately a half-million people are in prison or jail for a drug offense today, compared to an estimated 41,000 in 1980-an increase of 1,100 percent. Drug arrests have tripled since 1980. As a result, more than 31 million people have been arrested for drug offenses since the drug war began.

Before we begin our tour of the drug war, it is worthwhile to get a couple of myths out of the way. The first is that the war is aimed at ridding the nation of drug "kingpins" or big-time drug dealers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of those arrested are not charged with serious offenses. In 2005, for example, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, and only one in five was for sales. Moreover, most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity.


The second myth is that the drug war is principally concerned with dangerous drugs. Quite to the contrary, arrests for marijuana possession-a drug less harmful than tobacco or alcohol-accounted for nearly 80 percent of the growth in drug arrests in the 1990's. Despite the fact that most drug arrests are for nonviolent minor offenses, the War on Drugs has ushered in an era of unprecedented punitiveness.

The percentage of drug arrests that result in prison sentences (rather than dismissal, community service, or probation) has quadrupled, resulting in a prison-building boom the likes of which the world has never seen. In two short decades, between 1980 and 2000, the number of people incarcerated in our nation's prisons and jails soared from roughly 300,000 to more than 2 million. By the end of 2007, more than 7 million Americans-or one in every 31 adults-were behind bars, on probation, or on parole.

People of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than people of color. One study, for example, published in 2000 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students. That same survey revealed that nearly identical percentages of white and black high school seniors use marijuana. The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported in 2000 that white youth aged 12-17 are more than a third more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth.


Nevertheless, black men have been admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is more than thirteen times higher than white men. The racial bias inherent in the drug war is a major reason that 1 in every 14 black men was behind bars in 2006, compared with 1 in 106 white men. For young black men, the statistics are even worse. One in 9 black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five was behind bars in 2006.


Many thanks to all for caring and standing up for a better future and world that works for everyone.

Manna Jo Greene
148 Cottekill Rd.
Cottekill, NY 12419

845-687-9253 (home/home office)
845-807-1270 (cell, doesn't always work well at home)
www.mannajo.weebly.com


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For instance.......here's an issue that should have been taken care of long ago-- to avoid jail expansion...


Enact a "rocket docket" here for Dutchess similar to what NYC has put into place in their criminal justice system. As Acting Public Defender Tom Angell pointed out last July 1st, 80% of those now sitting in our county jail at $130 a day haven't even gone to trial yet-- a drastically higher number than most other county jails. According to Angell, "the length of stay of nonviolent felonies has increased by 46% over the last 12 months, but arrests have gone down 13% from 12 months ago, violent felony arrests have decreased 25%, and drug felony arrests have gone down 27%-- yet our county jail population has increased by approximately 5% over the past year. We should have seen a corresponding decrease in our county jail population."


Note-- for much, much more info on how rocket dockets work across U.S., see:
http://www.ktre.com/story/16518042/angelina-rocket-docket-shows-jail-numbers-going-down ;
http://somerset-kentucky.com/newslive/x1202035252/Several-drug-offenders-prosecuted-with-Rocket-Docket ; http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-rocket-docket.htm ;
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/01/27/qanda-with-a-defender-of-floridas-rocket-docket-foreclosures/
http://bizenrich.com/business_articles/legalriskmanagement/risk-management-rocket-docket-arbitration-can-save .


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[here-- documentation on how http://www.PYHIT.com saves Albany Co. taxpayers $14 million annually!]


From: Judy Troilo

Attached is a summarized breakdown of our study. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me directly.

Judy Troilo
Executive Director
Peter Young Housing, Industries & Treatment
The Altamont Program, Inc.
518 377 2448 ext 215
http://www.PYHIT.com


Total gross savings to the state of NY= $13,835,272.00


Breakdown of total gross savings:

TANF 140 @ $39,624.00 Per person $5,547,360.00
SN 96 @ $8,116.00 Per person $779,136.00
CJ 103 @ $45,000.00 Per person $4,635,000.00
SA 172 @ $16,708.00 Per person $2,873,776.00

$13,835,272.00


Total cost to State and Local Government to provide employment services through the Altamont Program, Inc. which resulted in the successful employment placement and maintenance of the participants = $1,127,700 .00

After subtracting the cost per individual for services resulting in successful outcomes the total savings = $12,707,572.00

Breakdown of COST for services provided which resulted in successful outcomes by the Altamont Program:

TANF 140 @ $3,000 Per person $420,000
SN 96 @ $2,000 Per person $192,000
CJ 103 @ $1,500 Per person $154,500
SA 172 @ $2,100 Per person $361,200
Peter Young Housing, Industries & Treatment

Mission Statement: Creating Taxpayers


Our mission consists of the following: To help individuals recover from the disease of alcohol and drug addiction. To help ease the transition from correctional facilities to community living, and assist the individual to confront and overcome the underlying problems that trigger and sustain substance abuse and other self-destructive behaviors. To end the cycle of incarceration and relapse, and assist the individual in successful and constructive reentry into society. In short, to create taxpayers.
We create taxpayers by serving people who are afflicted with chemical dependencies; those who are homeless; and those unprepared to make a successful transition to the world of work and good citizenship, responsibility, and community reintegration.

Summary:

The Altamont Program's Vocational Educational and Employment Services division is the component of Father Peter Young's programs which is responsible for assisting individuals with employment placement and job retention services. Historically The Altamont Program's Client base is considered a 'Hard to Serve', chronically unemployed population. The Majority of theses individuals have profound barriers as a result of years of substance abuse, incarceration and chronic unemployment. Many of these individuals have multiple barriers and many secondary issues which have prevented successful transition back into the work force. The Altamont Program considers and assists the 'entire' person. The Altamont Program has successfully served thousands of individuals across the state and enabled many to successfully reintegrate back into society. Father Young's aftercare network, referred to as the "Glidepath To Recovery," effectively addresses the obstacles to a successful recovery by providing guidance in the way of professional treatment, a safe place to stay, and a meaningful job.

Purpose of Analysis:

The purposes of this analysis was to identify the cost savings to the State of New York by way of PYHIT Employment services' creating tax payers.

About the Data:


The data sets used for this analysis were extracted from Altamont Program Employment program contract and non contract data spread sheets covering the period of 8/1/09-7/31/10. The complete spread sheets are used for tracking purposes of all individuals served during a given period. They are specifically drawn from data charts of participation and outcomes defined as: VESID, Albany County Department of Social Services SafetyNET Individuals and TANF (including Transitional Jobs and GREEN Jobs), Rensselaer County Task Force, Honor Court and Parole direct referrals, Office of Temporary Disability Assistance Funded programs; FSET (Food Stamp), WSP (Wage Subsidy Program) and WTW/HIV (Welfare to Work, HIV). All Data extracted is considered successful outcomes. Successful outcomes is defined as: hard to serve individuals placed in meaningful employment with offered benefits and monitored for at least 90 days to confirm retention.


About the Process:

Four (4) major categories were defined which identify the clear and known barriers to employment of the hard to serve population (the PYHIT population). For this purpose the meaning of clear and known is- the individuals were referred directly from an entity identifying them us such (i.e., ACDSS TANF program, NYS parole, etc.) or they met a criteria of a program which requires proof of barriers (i.e. VESID and/or NYSID for substance abuse disability).


Categories:

SUBSTANCE ABUSE CLIENT
CRIMINAL JUSTICE CLIENT
TANF CLIENT
SAFETY NET CLIENT

Only successful outcomes were extracted from the complete Altamont Program, Employment Services' data base and categorized appropriately. It is important to note approximately 20% are included in more then one category as the original data dictates more then one clear and known major barrier as defined.

The cost to the State of New York per individual (or TANF family) was approximated by obtaining hard costs from the respective state or local government agencies either via Web search or direct contact with agency representative. These numbers represent the cost, to New York State, eliminated per individual in each category on or before 90 days of employment retention has been met.

List of per Individual cost per Category:

Substance Abuse Client
In-Patient Treatment-$4,426
Out-Patient Treatment-$5,580
Supportive Living-$5,400
Food Stamps-$978
Transportation-$324
Total Cost per Individual = $16,708.00

TANF recipient
(Average case size of 3 member family)
Cash Grant (housing)-$8,640
Food Stamps-$5,880
Child Care-$18,720
Medicaid-$6.060
Transportation-$324
Total Cost per recipient= $39,624.00

SAFETY NET recipient
Cash Grant (housing)-$ 3,852
Food Stamps-$ 1,920
Medicaid-$ 2,020 (without SA treatment)
Transportation-$324
Total Cost per recipient= $8,116.00

Criminal Justice Client
Incarceration= $45,000
Total Cost per inmate= $45,000.00
4. Finally, the total amount of individual successes in each given category was multiplied by the approximated per individual cost provided for each categories.

The Results:

Approximately 409 individuals served by the Altamont Program's Employment department during the period 8/1/09-7/31/10 were successfully placed in employment and retained their job. A total of 511 successes were noted (approximately 98 in two (2) or more categories).

Breakdown of Success:


TANF 140 @ $39,624.00 Per person $5,547,360.00
SN 96 @ $8,116.00 Per person $779,136.00
CJ 103 @ $45,000.00 Per person $4,635,000.00
SA 172 @ $16,708.00 Per person $2,873,776.00

$13,835,272.00 actual

Total savings to the State of New York= $13,835,272.00 *
* Based on hard data. original data source is maintained by Judy Troilo of the Altamont Program. Data sets are available through: P.G. Young, J. Gentile or J. Troilo

Additional savings not reflected in Data analysis:

C. Matthews (2007) explains The daily cost for housing an inmate in a local jail ranges from $291 in New York City to more than $100 for counties outside the city, according to the Association of Counties. Counties and New York City house hundreds of inmates awaiting transfer to state prisons, representing a total of $38 million in annual expenses for counties, the group said.


C. Matthews, (July 26, 2007) NY: Inmates can get health benefits when released., The Real Cost of Prison Weblog. http://realcostofprisons.org/blog/archives/2007/07/ny_inmates_can.html


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[info here on how/why the Project Return program should be funded again at county Youth Bureau]

Recall below info from Dutchess CSEA Pres. Liz Piraino (Lizbeth.Piraino@dfa.state.ny.us):

To: Robert Rolison, Chairman
Dutchess County Legislature

Date: November 23, 2010

The justification given on November 17th for decimating the Youth Services Unit, including the elimination of a Youth Worker as well as the complete elimination of Project Return was because, "In the last ten years, other evidence-based practices have been incorporated in other departments that also serve these high risk youth." (Director of HHSC speaking before the Dutchess County Legislature's Budget and Finance Committee) Less than ten minutes later, the same Cabinet Director attributed the decrease in DSS placement numbers to "?the good work of Youth Bureau staff and the good work of Probation and a lot of contractors."

"Evidence based practices" and "Evidence based programs" are two recent buzz words used in government for those programs that have received millions of dollars in order to study their effectiveness. In the past twenty-five years, YSU has not been permitted to apply for any grants other than those available from OCFS or DSS, so millions have not been spent to see if our programming works. We do, however, have thousands of case records in our files that provide evidence of what kind of "success" our young clients have attained while in our programs.

The cost for CSE Placements (room & board) in the Tentative 2011 DSS budget is $7,200,000, up $384,000. The cost for Institutional Care Placements in the same budget is $17,400,000, up $1,457,000 from 2010. the amount proposed to spend is up $2,300,000 over the total amount expended in 2009, and up $2,6000,000 over the total amount expended in 2008. Together, between school-placed youth and DSS placed youth, the tentative budget is recommending a whopping $21,600,000 to send kids out the community in 2011!

Over the past five years, Project Return has worked with 194 high risk teenagers. Only eight (8) young people were closed due to out of home placements and five (5) of those placements were terms in non-secure detention or rehab ordered by the Youth Treatment Court as sanctions for failing to comply with judicial orders.

Over the same time period, YSU provided counseling, advocacy and skills building for 1376 young people. Only three (3) were closed due to out of home placements. [Please note that these figures do not include nearly three thousand young county residents who received workshop trainings on anti-bullying, bias awareness, anger management and conflict resolution skills.]

During the same November 17th budget hearing, the figure of $240,000 was quoted as the amount it cost to house a youth in jail for one year. This amounts to $657.53 per youth per day. Project Return costs under $24 per youth per day to keep them in their homes and in the community! The counseling services provided to Youth Services Unit clients not involved in Project Return cost less than $8 per youth per day.


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Ten things Dutchess County needs to do before even thinking about ANY kind of jail expansion locally:


[recall-- http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2010/11/stop-gop-plan-for-new-75-million-300.html ]

1. First, Dutchess should have a fraternity for dads behind bars similar to what Newark's Mayor Cory Booker recently started there-- an organization for incarcerated fathers that has literally slashed the local recidivism rate from 65% to 3% (recall Time magazine article on this Nov. 29; CNN report too).
[see: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2032144,00.html ]

2. Second, Dutchess should implement a truly comprehensive system of re-entry for folks leaving jail and prison modeled after Brooklyn DA Charlie Hynes' ComAlert program there that has tremendously slashed the recidivism rate (and been repeated recognized by the Times in editorial and op-ed pages for this; still working; see http://www.petitiononline.com/comalert ; http://www.BrooklynDA.org .


[recall-- ComAlert Director John Chaney spoke at Holy Light Pentecostal Church in Poughkeepsie last summer at one of our Jobs Not Jails meetings and shared numbers-- they've cut recidivism rate in half!]

3. Third, Dutchess should implement a cost-saving Job Court program modeled after the model one from Lancaster County/PA'profiled a few years ago by National Public Radio (to cut recidivism).
[see: http://www.petitiononline.com/jobcourt ]

4. Fourth, Dutchess should welcome with open arms Father Peter Young and his organization-- that has slashed recidivism in parts of NYS where they have operations from 67% to less than 10%, as proven by a recent study by the John Jay School of Criminal Justice(!)....(you may recall forum I hosted with Father Peter Young on this at the Family Partnership Center in Poughkeepsie several years ago; rep's from sheriff's office came out to this event-- and were quite positive re: need for much more re: re-entry).
[see: http://www.PYHIT.com ]

5. Fifth, Dutchess should finally and fully implement a cost-saving housing-first strategy for the chronically mentally ill homeless alcoholics and drug addicts who have been cycling in and out of our jail here in Dutchess...recall-- I've been pushing for this for literally five years now-- since first learning about it in a Jan. '05 article in Mother Jones magazine by Douglas McGray-- "Life on the Inside"...thx to 29 of you out there all across the county who signed on to my http://www.PetitionOnline.com/House1st to make exactly this happen; recall as well NYTimes piece on this several years ago, pointing out how a housing-first approach to homeless there has cut homeless population literally in half(!)...housing-first is also working quite well in various parts of NYC, Chattanooga, San Francisco, and all over the U.S.
[see: http://www.PathwaystoHousing.org -- recall forum I organized with PTHousing folks @ FP Center]

6. Sixth, Dutchess should fully embrace all the cost-saving, pro-active, preventive recommendations put forth by the national and statewide Fight Crime: Invest in Kids Coalition (recall-- even Sheriff Butch Anderson and DA Bill Grady have long been charter members of this organization that calls for serious, pro-active, preventive, cost-saving investments in pre-K, afterschool activities, and community-based programs for low-risk to medium-risk youth prone to juvenile delinquency; see http://www.AECF.org ).
[see http://www.FightCrime.org ; former Tompkins Co. Leg. Chair Tim Joseph shared news with me five years ago about this coalition; Joseph led successful opposition there to jail expansion for years]

7. Seventh, Dutchess should fully restore county $ for these 3 crucial programs eliminated by GOP:

-- Restore BOCES GED program in our Jail (endorsed even by jail's leadership) just eliminated by GOP.
[tho only $87,000/year this program cuts recidivism rate in half for Transition Unit-- from 56% to 28%]

-- Restore Project Return (juvenile delinquency prevention) for 45 kids at Youth Bureau just cut by GOP.
[effectively costing only $24/day to keep youth with families--instead of $657/day to be incarcerated!]


-- Restore Mediation Center of Du. Co. (juvenile delinquency prevention for troubled teens) cut by GOP.
[youth in 245 different families served last year in community-- not $240,000/year each for incarceration]

8. Eighth, Dutchess should fully restore county $ for these five programs massively cut by GOP for '11: Cornell/4-H, Youth Mentoring/Job Training/Placement at Dutchess County Regional Chamber of Commerce, Dutchess County Arts Council, Mill Street Loft, and Literacy Connections-- all four of these local institutions perform an incredibly valuable service to the community keeping youth on right track.


9. Ninth, Dutchess should make sure that our county is on the cutting edge re: cost-saving criminal justice innovations-- i.e., "diverting low-end probation and parole violators to nonincarcerative settings"-- like the HOPE Project in Hawaii, the High Point project in North Carolina and an experiment in Multnomah County (home to Portland, Oregon)...All these model programs view jail and prison sentences as a last option rather than a default, and swift responses to violations are considered more important than harsh ones. For reformers, it is a rare breath of fresh air." (as reported on in the July 5th cover article in The Nation by Sasha Abramsky-- "Is This The End of the War on Crime?"...note, too, programs like this are strongly recommended by the Vera Institute's Michael Jacobson, and
[see: http://www.thenation.com/article/end-war-crime?page=full ; http://www.Vera.org ]

10. Tenth, Dutchess should implement all of the recommendations from http://www.JusticePolicy.org .

[note re: below-- I've contacted Mike Thompson, director of the New York-based Council of State Government's Justice Center (see http://www.JusticeCenter.csg.org -- quoted in July 5th The Nation piece cited above; copied below)-- he seems quite interested in pulling together with us to organize a forum soon re: common-sense, cost-saving alternatives to jail expansion locally; details to come!]


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Did you know that Brooklyn's ComAlert system of re-entry (lauded in 2007 NYTimes editorial below) has been proven to cut the recidivism rate in half there over the last decade?...(it's true!)...

[for 11/29/07 NYTimes editorial "The Right Way to Handle Former Inmates" click here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/opinion/29thu3.html?ref=opinion ]

My point?...Wouldn't it be great if Dutchess County could put into place a truly effective system of re-entry the way that Brooklyn (and/or Rev. Peter Young) has?...(especially since ours is 56%-- meaning well over half of the folks who leave our county jail are incarcerated again in three years)...

[crucial issue-- as if we have effective re-entry program in place, costly jail expansion could be avoided!]
Recall http://www.petitiononline.com/comalert (sign on!)-- petition I launched on this several years ago for local action on this after NYTimes editorial came out; thx to Doris Kelly and Karl Volk for signin' on...

[see: Erin Jacobs & Bruce Western, Report on the Evaluation of the ComAlert Prisoner Reentry Program (Oct. 2007) http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/western/pdfs/report_1009071.pdf ; also, see recent Journal of Court Innovation report on the re-entry miracles Brooklyn is making happen:
http://www.brooklynda.org/News/pdf/journal_of_court_innovation.pdf !]

[and-- scroll down below-- check out ComAlert'Doe Fund's "Ready, Willing & Able" jobs program-- wouldn't it be great if Poughkeepsie and Dutchess had something like it?...(have invited W. Brown too)]

Note-- thx again to Jobs Not Jails' Wesley Lee (founder of Save At-Risk Children for Corporate America and Jobs Not Jails Cheryl Beckles (of the Town of Poughkeepsie) for their testimony earlier this month at Co. Leg. mtg.'s speaking truth to power-- pushing for Co. Leg. to SERIOUSLY (not just give lip service) consider all of the many innovations proven to work across U.S. to lower jail overcrowding!...
http://save-at-risk-children-for-corporate-america-inc-of-westchest.assistance-from-nonprofits.aidpage.com/ ; http://www.whvw.net/nyp1/
http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2010/12/04/news/doc4cf9ce2434a94518783804.txt ...

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>From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/opinion/29thu3.html?ref=opinion ...

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL
The Right Way to Handle Former Inmates
Published: November 29, 2007

To control recidivism, and thus have a shot at controlling prison crowding and costs, the states and localities need to develop comprehensive programs that help former inmates find jobs, housing, training, drug treatment and mental health care. A promising model has emerged in Brooklyn, where District Attorney Charles Hynes started his re-entry program long before other jurisdictions even realized they were necessary.

Created in 1999 in Brooklyn, ComAlert was recently the subject of a state-funded study carried out by the district attorney's office in collaboration with Bruce Western of Harvard, a sociologist and criminal justice expert. The program is still evolving and is far from perfect. But the study shows that former inmates are more likely to get jobs and keep jobs - and more likely to remain out of jail - if they undergo a rigorous regime of counseling and drug treatment while participating in a companion program that offers them immediate work experience and job training.

Drug treatment, counseling and drug testing are cornerstones of the ComAlert program. In addition to being counseled and tested, participants are also encouraged to sign up with Ready, Willing & Able, a highly regarded work and training program offered by the Doe Fund, a nonprofit organization in New York.

Many of those who join the program have little or no experience with the world of work. They begin to get that experience by working full time in low-skill jobs like street cleaning, which pays between $7.40 and $8.15 per hour. Most participants are eventually moved into vocational programs where they are trained in one of several areas, including food preparation, pest control, office services and building management. They are often referred to jobs at companies that have longstanding relationships with the program.

According to the report, ComAlert graduates are less likely be re-arrested after leaving prison and much more likely to be employed than either program dropouts or members of the control group. Participants who complete the Doe Fund work-training component do even better. They have an employment rate of about 90 percent, somewhat higher than the ComAlert graduates generally and several times higher than the control group.

These results are quite promising...the program is clearly headed in the right direction and deserves to be expanded and emulated elsewhere. It represents an impressive start toward the goal of helping newly released inmates forge viable lives on the outside.

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>From http://www.BrooklynDA.org/toc/reentry.htm ...

ComALERT
(Community and Law Enforcement Resources Together)

The ComALERT ("Community and Law Enforcement Resources Together") program was created in 1999 by District Attorney Charles J. Hynes to act as a bridge between prison and the community for parolees returning to Brooklyn. ComALERT assists formerly incarcerated individuals to make a successful transition from prison to home by providing drug treatment and counseling, mental health treatment and counseling, GED, and transitional housing and employment. ComALERT also provides permanent job placement assistance to those parolees who have marketable skills upon their release. ComALERT services begin almost immediately upon release from prison, increasing the success rate for its clients compared to the non-treated re-entry population.

A newly released inmate is required to report to the Division of Parole within 24 to 48 hours of release from prison. Based on a pre-release assessment need for treatment, a referral may be made by the parole officer to Parole's ACCESS center. At this center, a ComALERT "CASAC" ("certified alcohol and substance abuse counselor") interviews the parolee about his past activities and future goals. This psychosocial assessment forms the basis for any future re-entry planning and treatment in ComALERT. After the assessment, the eligible client is directed to report to the ComALERT Counseling Service EDNY Center at 210 Joralemon Street in downtown Brooklyn, for a program orientation and assignment to a social worker who will work with the client to help him comply with his conditional release requirements that include substance abuse treatment and employment.

Most ComALERT clients have substance abuse issues, and many are actively abusing illegal drugs and alcohol. This abuse places them in direct contradiction of standard conditional release mandates and increases the likelihood that they will engage in illegal behaviors and return to prison. Thus, substance abuse treatment and counseling form the basic framework for ComALERT's initial three-month enrollment. Though the typical period at ComALERT is one to two years depending on personal progress, the first three months have been identified as crucial to the client's ultimate success. If not engaged in the re-entry process during that time, it is likely that the client will not make a successful transition from prison to the community.

In addition to drug counseling and treatment, many clients will receive a referral to and preferential placement in, the ComALERT "Ready, Willing, & Able" Program, which provides transitional employment through the Doe Fund's Ready, Willing, and Able employment programs. In addition to receiving meals and a weekly stipend of $200 cash for manual labor jobs for up to nine consecutive months, the Day program provides the group support and reinforcement needed by the clients to maintain their sobriety. ComALERT provides weekly individual and group counseling, as well as random drug testing, to reinforce "Ready, Willing, & Able Day's" zero-tolerance policy.
Working closely with the Division of Parole, ComALERT monitors its clients to ensure public safety. A failure to cooperate or a violation of any program condition is brought to the immediate attention of the client's parole officer. A law enforcement sanction-up to and including parole revocation-can be employed at the discretion of the parole officer. Lesser sanctions, such as more frequent drug testing, can also be used for less serious infractions.

ComALERT's goal is to reduce criminal recidivism by providing the formerly incarcerated with the tools and support they need to remain drug-free, crime-free, and employed.

For more information about these programs, contact:

John R. Chaney
Executive Director
LaNina N. Cooke
Deputy Executive Director
Norma Fernandes
Community Coordinator
ComALERT Offices:
718-250-3281

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More from http://www.BrooklynDA.org/toc/reentry.htm ...

ComALERT offers its most motivated participants an opportunity to enroll in the Doe Fund's "Ready, Willing & Able" program and offers:

¨ Paid Work
Ready, Willing, & Able offers work in their Community Improvement Project and IMMEDIATELY start earning $7.40/hr. They will bring home $185/week after putting $74 into their mandatory savings accounts. After 6 months their pay will be raised to $8.15 per hour and, after a deduction of $60 for mandatory savings, will bring home $225.25/week.

¨ Vocational Training and Jobs
Ready, Willing, & Able works with each individual to help them find a permanent job by offering one-on-one case management and mentoring from counselors and graduates. Clients are also eligible for vocational training in fields such as: Pest Control, Food Service, Commercial Driving, Mailroom Operations, and Community Improvement Supervision.

¨ Education
Ready, Willing, & Able offers GED preparation courses, computer/literacy classes and individual tutoring, and vocational certification opportunities.

¨ Aftercare
Ready, Willing, & Able Aftercare Department provides supportive services to help each graduate keep their job and provide incentives for job retention.

¨ Drug and Alcohol Counseling
Some Ready, Willing, & Able participants will receive weekly substance abuse counseling for their first three months through ComALERT Counseling Service EDNY. In addition, participants are drug tested, at least weekly, and referred to daily self-help meetings or related services.

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED CONTACT:

William Brown, Assistant Director, RWA Intake

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[ok-- this Nation cover story is from almost 2 years ago-- but Dutchess still hasn't embraced these ideas!]

>From http://www.thenation.com/article/end-war-crime?page=full ...

Is This the End of the War on Crime?
Sasha Abramsky
June 16, 2010 | This article appeared in the July 5, 2010 edition of The Nation.


"Necessity," says Lorenzo Jones, executive director of the Connecticut-based A Better Way Foundation, "is the mother of invention." Jones, who has spent his adult life swimming against monster currents in his efforts to reform the country's criminal justice system, pauses to chuckle deeply at his own cliché. When it comes to drug policy, he continues, think of the present moment "as moving from a war economy to a postwar economy."

For decades, progressive policy analysts and criminal justice reformers such as Jones have argued that state and federal antidrug and, more generally, "tough on crime" incarceration strategies were counterproductive: that they were dramatically reshaping American society, at a staggering fiscal and moral cost, and they weren't succeeding. Drug use remained commonplace, and high recidivism numbers for paroled prisoners suggested that prisons weren't remolding criminals into model citizens. Far better, they argued, to keep prisons as a last resort for the truly hardened, violent criminals and to invest more resources in less expensive, and more effective, alternatives to incarceration.

True, crime rates have fallen dramatically since the early 1990s, in part because of those higher incarceration rates. But most experts believe they fell in larger part because of demographic shifts, changes in policing practices and an easing of the crack epidemic. The drop-off in crime has, in turn, finally allowed a public slightly less scared of crime to be slightly more willing to look for nuance rather than sound bites when it comes to policy. It has created what Bart Lubow, a juvenile justice advocate with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, terms an "ideological space" for discussions of reform. "The overall context regarding crime policy," he says, "is much less hysterical than it was through most of the 1990s."

Faced with a growing body of evidence that carefully tailored rehabilitation models can reduce recidivism or drug use better than jails and prisons, and with a burgeoning crisis in local and state government finances, politicians and voters alike are turning their backs on basic tough-on-crime staples. Instead, they are looking for inspiration to programs such as the HOPE Project in Hawaii, the High Point project in North Carolina and an experiment in Multnomah County (home to Portland, Oregon) to divert low-end probation and parole violators to nonincarcerative settings. All these model programs view jail and prison sentences as a last option rather than a default, and swift responses to violations are considered more important than harsh ones. For reformers, it is a rare breath of fresh air.

"I think the criminal justice system is more under the microscope because of the fiscal situation," explains Mike Thompson, director of the New York-based Council of State Government's Justice Center. "Every state's facing fiscal problems, with the exception of North Dakota, and when you look at items where expenditures have risen in the last twenty years, corrections jumps out at you."

Around the country, legislators are essentially asking how they can get more bang for the bucks they spend fighting crime, drug use, mental illness and so on. And they're willing to consult reformers they would have shunned in the recent past as irredeemably "soft" on crime. "Nobody can sit here and say things are fine," argues Jones. "Something has to give. Now we can sit at the table with people we couldn't previously work with and say, 'What are you willing to give?' We are literally writing this narrative as we go."

In Texas a $600 million prison-expansion plan was shelved in 2007 in favor of a $241 million plan expanding community-based drug and alcohol treatment services, after researchers convinced legislators that the latter would lower crime rates more than expanding the state's penal infrastructure.

As a result, the notoriously prison-tough Lone Star State, whose leaders used to boast about its extraordinarily high incarceration rate, is implementing some of the country's most innovative reforms, creating a network of in-prison and post-prison residential drug treatment and DWI centers, mental health facilities, halfway houses for inmates being released onto parole, and nonjail residential settings for low-end parole violators. In 2009 the state's prison population declined, perhaps signaling the start of a reversal of nearly four decades of expansion, which saw the Lone Star State's prison numbers grow from just shy of 16,000 in 1972 to more than 170,000 in 2008. Texas joined twenty-five other states that saw reductions in the size of their inmate population last year.

In Kansas legislators approved a large investment in drug treatment programs and services for parolees designed to stop so many offenders from simply cycling back into prison after their release. The result was a drop in Kansas's prison population significant enough to allow the state to close several facilities.

Michigan recently reformed its prisoner-release process to allow for shorter sentences, winning accolades from the ACLU in the process. The state closed eight prisons as a result and invested some of the $250 million savings expected to be generated over a five-year period in an expanded network of mental health and job training services, as well as drug treatment programs.

All told, ten states have embraced "justice reinvestment" strategies such as this, reducing prison spending, investing a portion of the savings in more effective anticrime infrastructure and using the remainder of the savings to plug gaps elsewhere in their budgets. As this model spreads, says Thompson optimistically, we'll get more results-oriented policy-making than we've had in the past. "These are bipartisan, data-driven approaches: figure out what's driving the [prison population] growth and what can be done differently."

Even states that haven't formally adopted such a reinvestment strategy are, of necessity, being pushed in this direction. In California, home to the country's largest state prison population as well as the country's most dysfunctional state budget process, the combination of federal injunctions against overcrowding and the worst fiscal crunch since the Great Depression has brought the race to incarcerate of the past quarter-century to an end. Over the next several years, to the dismay of politicians who have built careers on being tough on crime, the prison population, which stands at around 170,000, will be reduced by several tens of thousands, with more emphasis on parole, probation and local drug treatment.

New Mexico recently enacted a law banning employers from asking job applicants if they have a felony record. An increasing number of states, including conservative bastions like Alabama and Louisiana, are restructuring their juvenile justice systems to move away from incarceration. Drug and mental health courts are channeling more offenders into structured treatment. And many states are rolling back their most restrictive truth-in-sentencing provisions, allowing low-level offenders to return to their communities after serving only a small percentage of their sentences behind bars.

Some states and localities are also starting to invest in restorative justice models, putting offenders to work to repair the damage they caused the community rather than simply warehousing them in prisons.
Father George Horan, co-director of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles's Office of Restorative Justice, has spent a lifetime watching youngsters do stupid things and, as a result, ruin their lives. He has seen generations of kids graduate from being troubled children to hardened prisoners. And he has grown increasingly cynical about the ability of penal institutions to solve ingrained social problems. Far better, he has come to believe, to sit nonviolent offenders down with their families, teachers, peers, even victims, and force them to come to terms with the consequences of their actions.

Horan, 64, has a ruddy complexion and dresses casually. From his small office in the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lincoln Heights, a bleak industrial area of Los Angeles just north of downtown, he works to help delinquent teens, many of them gang members, establish more productive bonds with their communities. When three teens broke into their school a few years back and trashed it, the Office of Restorative Justice persuaded the trial judge to consider a restorative justice solution. The kids had to face their principal and fellow students; they had to pay for the damage; and they had to spend their weekends doing community service at the school-cleaning classrooms, doing basic maintenance work, sweeping autumn leaves. The principal, recalls Horan, took the kids out to lunch, got to know them and encouraged them to attend to their studies. "She said the next year they were the three best kids in the school. What a better result than sending the kids to juvenile hall. They turned their lives around."

Horan is aware of the limitations of this strategy-he tried the same approach when three boys set fire to his church door, but this time the prosecutor insisted on seeking prison terms. Politically, he says, it would be next to impossible for prosecutors to embrace restorative justice for violent criminals. But Horan believes restorative justice models have to play a part in any revamping of America's criminal justice system. "Always, the first step is, the person has to take responsibility for what they did. That's the cornerstone," he explains. "What can a person do to heal the victim and heal the community?"

Meanwhile, extending the first-do-no-harm principles of the restorative justice movement, a growing number of politicians have started to identify sky-high African-American incarceration rates as a civil rights issue that, in tandem with high crime rates in poor communities, serves up a double whammy to already devastated neighborhoods. As a result, they have begun pushing legislation that characterizes the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans as a problem. Connecticut recently passed a "racial impact statement" law mandating all major legislative proposals for the criminal justice system be studied for their racial impact. Other states, looking for ways to preserve public safety without inflicting the kind of collateral damage on communities that mass incarceration unleashes, will likely follow suit.
No part of the criminal justice system has had more of a racially skewed impact than America's antidrug strategy. Over the decades, millions of young Americans, mainly poor and disproportionately black and brown, have been arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to jail or prison for their involvement with the drug trade. It has been a staggering exercise in futility.

Yet these days, the "war on drugs," which Barack Obama denounced as an utter failure during his presidential campaign, is showing the fragility of old age. At the urging of the Obama administration and top Justice Department officials, Congress is working to eliminate the infamous crack and powder-cocaine sentencing disparities. And over the next few years, the Justice Department's Task Force on Sentencing Reform will likely recommend more proportionate sentencing for many drug offenses.

The era of "Lock 'em up and throw away the key" seems, slowly, to be drawing to a close. And over the next few decades, that will likely have the effect of gradually drawing down the size of the bloated prison population. Even seasoned conservative voices are cognizant of the winds of change.

"My attitude has always been, speed and certainty are crucial aspects of running a criminal justice system, not length of sentence," argues James Q. Wilson, at one time the country's most influential conservative criminologist. "Many sentences could be shortened without endangering public safety."
Wilson, who rose to intellectual fame as President Nixon's favorite sociologist and later became known as the philosophical father of the Broken Windows policing theory, doesn't regret his role in developing ideas that helped contribute to America's mass incarceration experiment. But he also doesn't think that mass incarceration is, or should be, an end in itself. If there are alternatives that have at least as powerful an effect on reducing the crime rate, Wilson, an empiricist, believes they should be tried. Parole and probation systems should be reformed, he argues, so that violators are dealt with quickly and minor violators, such as those who fail a urine drug test, receive "a swift but very short penalty-a weekend in jail, a week in jail. It need not be returning people to serve a full prison term."

Changes in drug policy don't stop with shortening sentences, however. The administration recently lifted the ban on federal funding for needle-exchange programs-long a bugbear of drug-treatment and public health professionals. And for the first time since the 1970s, marijuana legalization movements are gaining traction at the state level. Californians will vote in November on a ballot measure to legalize pot, and preliminary polling indicates it could well pass. The initiative is buttressed by a number of politicians, like Assemblyman Tom Ammiano and State Senator Mark Leno, who have argued that legalizing marijuana would allow California to tax the lucrative market. Other states could follow in California's wake.

"People are now making a lawful income from cannabis here in California and other states," argues 57-year-old Chris Conrad, of the marijuana-advocacy newspaper West Coast Leaf, at a hummus-and-wine soiree to celebrate the opening of the Drug Policy Alliance's swank new downtown San Francisco offices. Conrad is talking about how the medical marijuana industry is increasingly using its clout to push for broader, across-the-board rollbacks of pot prohibition. "They can put that money back to invest in change. The idea is, it should be brought under control and tax revenue brought in. The whole financial argument is only going to get better. I think the drug war is fatally flawed, and it's doomed. It's just a matter of time; it could be five years, it could be twenty years. But prohibition doesn't work. It creates crime; it doesn't solve crime."

A few years ago Conrad would have been a countercultural refugee on the hippie fringe; these days, he and his ideas are increasingly mainstream. In fact, the attendees at the party oozed their radical-chic credentials; they were lawyers, doctors, politicians, consultants, businessmen. "The trend is for people to regulate rather than prohibit," asserted Doug Linney, the well-coiffed, sharp-dressed campaign consultant for the legalization initiative. "They see the current drug wars aren't working, especially regarding marijuana. There's an interest in changing it, especially because of the state's finances."

Cumulatively, all of these changes are bearing significant fruit. For the first time since the Nixon era, America's prison population is shrinking. In 2008, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the prison population fell in twenty states; in 2009 it fell in twenty-six states; and that trend is likely to continue in 2010. Moreover, as the number of drug-related sentences has declined slightly, so too has the appallingly high African-American incarceration rate edged slightly downward, off 9 percent from its peak a few years back. The gears of what journalist Joel Dyer, in the 1990s, tellingly labeled a "perpetual prisoner machine"-a self-sustaining interaction of conservative criminal justice lobbies, political opportunism, popular tough-on-crime sentiments, the economic needs of depressed prison towns and media sensationalism-seem finally to have gotten gummed up. Ironically, the federal government, which did so much to shift the country in a more conservative criminal justice direction for nearly fifty years, seems quite content to let the gears stay locked.

Most decisions about the criminal justice system are made at the state level. Despite the near-tenfold growth in the population of federal prison inmates since 1980, less than 10 percent of all inmates are serving federal sentences. But the federal government does perform some vital roles: it allocates resources directly (by, for example, patrolling the border and exporting the "war on drugs") and indirectly (by granting money to localities and states to set up antidrug task forces, funding drug and mental health treatment services, and putting more police on the streets). It creates overarching legal parameters within which states must operate (federal drug laws supersede state ones, which means that if California legalizes marijuana, for example, theoretically it would be setting up a conflict with DC). Perhaps most important, the federal government sets the tone for national conversations on crime and delinquency.

When it comes to tone-setting, sometimes what isn't said by federal officials is as important as what is.

Over the past couple of years, President Obama's drug czar, ex-Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske, has chosen not to follow his predecessors with regard to medical marijuana. Whereas John Walters, Bush's drug czar, testified across the country against state medical marijuana laws, Kerlikowske has stayed silent. The effect, says Drug Policy Alliance executive director Ethan Nadelmann, has been to send a "green light to the states that they could have the freedom to go their own way on this." Kerlikowske, Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama himself steer clear of talking about the "war on drugs," and they generally don't use sound bites to trumpet their "tough" credentials when it comes to tackling the complex problem of crime.

But what is being said is also fascinating. "Too many of our citizens have come to have doubts about our criminal justice system," Holder told a Congressional Black Caucus symposium on June 24, 2009. "We must be honest with each other and have the courage to ask difficult questions of ourselves and our system. We must break out of the old and tired partisan stances that have stood in the way of needed progress and reform. We have a moment in time that must be seized in order to ensure that all of our citizens are treated in a way that is consistent with the ideals embodied in our founding documents. This Department of Justice is prepared to act."

Indeed, in a series of key speeches over the past year, Holder has delivered a commitment, unprecedented in recent decades, to use the might of the Justice Department to ensure a fairer, less coercive criminal justice system. Addressing the NAACP in July 2009, the attorney general talked of the devastating harm that harsh drug sentences have caused in poor communities. "It is not justice," he declared, "to continue our adherence to a sentencing scheme that disproportionately affects some Americans, and some communities, more severely than others."

The previous week, he told an audience at the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York-based think tank, that "getting smart on crime requires talking honestly about which policies have worked and which have not, without fear of being labeled as too hard or, more likely, too soft on crime. Getting smart on crime means moving beyond useless labels and instead embracing science and data, and relying on them to shape policy. And it means thinking about crime in context-not just reacting to the criminal act but developing the government's ability to enhance public safety before the crime is committed and after the former offender is returned to society." Taking their cue from Holder, a slew of top officials have begun revamping the language they use to discuss crime and punishment.

As Kerlikowske explained to The Nation in March, shortly after he returned from a UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs meeting in Vienna, the country should not continue to think of drugs merely as a public safety problem but should start to see them as a public health problem. "My colleagues, I never heard them talk of a war on drugs," he said. "I've heard elected officials talk about it, but not police chiefs, sheriffs or prosecutors. They talk about it with the complexity the problem deserves."

In reshaping the national discourse on drugs, Kerlikowske touts his law enforcement credentials. He's a tough guy, a strong policeman with thirty-seven years on the job, and he knows he commands respect. "For me, it's a little bit like Nixon going to China," he explains. Kerlikowske has "very little concern about being labeled soft on drugs." And so he wants to talk about being "smart on drugs," instead of merely "tough." In fact, when he explains his mandate, the country's drug czar is more comfortable using the language of public health professionals than political posturers. "The 'war on drugs' was a simplistic answer to this really complex problem," he says. "We have to look at talking about addiction as a disease rather than a moral failure or saying people should just stop using drugs."

For the first time in more than forty years, criminal justice trends are starting to move in a sensible direction. At the local and state levels, fiscal necessity is forcing a rethink when it comes to incarceration strategies. And at the federal level, the politics that allowed George H.W. Bush to batter Michael Dukakis with images of Willie Horton, Bill Clinton to sign an execution warrant on the brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector and George W. Bush to push glibly for more teens to be tried and sentenced as adults is taking a back seat to smart, holistic thinking.


"Everyone I talk to around the country has been affected by drugs," Kerlikowske says. "But it's not talked about the same way as if you had a member of your family having cancer-or even alcoholism. When I look at the drug problem, what it costs in healthcare costs, police-community relations, the Southwest border, foreign relations-every one of those things, drugs are a part. If we could recognize how inextricably linked to all of these issues drug consumption and addiction is, if we could work to address it with the complexity it deserves, that would make more sense than holding a press conference and showing a ton of cocaine or five people led out in handcuffs."

Of all the changes in tone brought about by Obama's election, in the long run few will be more significant to the country's well-being than those around criminal justice and drugs. Without a whole lot of fanfare, the administration is laying the foundations for a new criminal justice system model that might, conceivably, end America's morally disastrous, fiscally ruinous, four-decade-long experimentation with mass incarceration.