By Mark S. Fleisher, Ph.D.
I’m not a fan of prison reentry programs. I don’t dislike reentry programs like I dislike poison ivy but rather after decades of fieldwork among gangs, active criminals, and men and women who have returned to the urban and rural streets once, twice, three, four and more times, I have become cynical about the nature and purpose of investing millions only to add to increase employment outside prisons.
My cynicism begs the question of how we measure the outcome of reentry programs.
Some say that recidivism measures prisons’ failure to rehabilitate convicted felons; though as a former employee of a correctional system, never did I come to believe in the mystical power of transformation that so many believe exists inside a prison.
I could be wrong; it could be that I missed seeing the transformation mystery in the same way I’ve missed the mystical power of universities to transform young students into adults who thirst for knowledge.
More often than not, in 30 years of university teaching, young students’ thirst for beer far exceeds their thirst for history, mathematics, foreign language, art, and literature.
University students, like inmates, find the path of least resistance and path of greatest gain for themselves. But at least young men and women enter college with a modicum of education that’s given them some literacy skill; and if they choose to pick low-hanging fruit, so be it — they paid dearly for the bits and pieces of information they acquire.
Students win a college diploma with their name on it. A college and its staff and faculty win too; they get paid. In the short run, though, low-hanging fruit won’t prove to satisfy the job market of the 21st century. So today those students of years past whose thirst for knowledge was slight now complain that society, a place where people earn their way, offers them nothing.
Convicted felons are a different breed. There are no academic prerequisites for entre into the status of prison inmate. So, research tells us, more than half of all prisoners are semi-literate or illiterate; more than half have some form of mental illness; more than half are addicts; around half were convicted of violent crime; and nearly half have been prisoners at least once before they enter prison yet again.
Can it be realistically argued that if public schools cannot educate adolescents or engage them well enough in matters that directly shape their life path then American prisons can transform semi-literate addicts with mental health problems and violent proclivities into productive, tax-paying citizens? That’s an argument I’d like to hear.
It’s time to stop the mass self-delusion of American society that pouring tens of millions into reentry will accomplish a near-impossible task of human transformation. I suggest that if not a nickel more were spent on reentry that not a single taxpayer would fret and lose sleep.
Correctional personnel know that high recidivism means job security not only for themselves but also for local, state, and federal law enforcement personnel and the industries that supply prisons and law enforcement. Ironically, in my personal experience, high recidivism relieves the stress on released prisoners who face an unknown world that isn’t exactly happy to see them.
Social engineering has been an awful habit of the American government. I contend that if local, state, and federal governments stop funding re-entry programs, those who feel the effect are not former prisoners but tax-paying persons who rely on society’s dreadful thought of crime and re-imprisonment for their own well-being.
When it comes down to it, cries of recidivism reduction do injustice to prison personnel and prisoners who, despite our own Pollyannaish beliefs of their success outside prison, find prison life easy, predictable, and a just another way to go from birth to the final buzzer. Let’s stop trying to re-shape others’ lives.
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About the author: Mark Fleisher is Research Professor of Social Work at The Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of Warehousing Violence, Beggars and Thieves: The Lives of Urban Street Criminals, Dead End Kids: Gang Girls and the Boys They Know, Crime and Employment: Issues in Crime Reduction for Corrections, and The Myth of Prison Rape: Sexual Culture in American Prisons.