By Jan Moller
Times-Picayune
BATON ROUGE, La. — Aiming to reduce the number of repeat offenders clogging Louisiana’s correctional system, Gov. Bobby Jindal announced plans Wednesday to expand and standardize pre-release services offered to state inmates being housed in local or parish jails.
The program, which would be piloted in the Shreveport area before expanding later this year to Orleans Parish, would provide an extra $7 per inmate per day to local sheriffs, who would contract with the state to provide a range of services to prisoners on the verge of being paroled into society. The services are aimed at helping inmates get jobs and housing to be contributing members of society.
Offenders leaving state prisons already get 100 hours of pre-release services, which range from education, drug counseling and vocational training to classes on communications skills, job-search training and resume writing. But such services are often in short supply in parish and local jails, where the state typically sends inmates with shorter sentences until they are released.
Once the pilot programs in New Orleans and Shreveport are up and running, the state’s goal is to expand the program to the point where 10 regional re-entry points would serve all of the approximately 18,000 state inmates currently being held in local institutions.
Louisiana has the second-highest incarceration rate in the world, and statistics show that half of all offenders will return to prison within five years of being released. The governor said pre-release training can help reduce those rates, citing a program developed at Dixon Correctional Institute that brought the five-year recidivism rate down to 36 percent.
The administration set aside $1.1 million for the program in its 2009-10 budget recommendations to the Legislature. Another $900,000 in the Department of Corrections budget for next year would finance “Day Reporting Centers” in New Orleans and Shreveport that provide early-intervention services to parolees who might otherwise end up back in jail for technical violations.
Corrections Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc, who was the warden at Dixon before taking over the corrections agency, said the goal is to lower the state’s recidivism rate to 40 percent within five years.
He said numerous studies have found pre-release services to be effective, in some cases by providing basic tools such as identification cards that are needed to get jobs.
LeBlanc said the eventual goal is to stabilize a prison population that has grown dramatically in the past quarter century. One in 55 Louisiana adults was behind bars in 2007, compared to one in 205 adults in 1982.
The state currently spends $543 million a year on adult corrections, and $160 million more to house low-level offenders in parish and local jails. Approximately 15,000 inmates per year are released, meaning that a 10-percentage-point cut in recidivism would result in 1,500 people per year avoiding jail time who otherwise would reoffend.
Copyright 2009 Times-Picayune