EDITORIAL: Taking steps to reduce recidivism
The scene played out at least a couple of times in all those tough-as-nails crime thrillers Hollywood pumped out in the 1930s and 1940s.
An inmate leaves “the big house” after serving his time. Once he hops on a bus, a suitcase in his hand and a few bucks in his pocket, the rest of the movie revolves around whether he stays on the straight-and-narrow or gives in to his baser impulses and heads back behind bars.
In real life, unfortunately, all too many prisoners do end up breaking the law after they are released, and many end up being locked up again. The Bureau of Justice Statistics followed more than 400,000 state prisoners from 2005 to 2014, and found that 68% of them were rearrested within three years of their release, 79% were rearrested within six years and 83% within nine years. Many of them were incarcerated again. It’s called recidivism, and, in the words of a 2021 essay in the Harvard Political Review, it “clogs the criminal justice system.”
Of course, making sure that every ex-prisoner follows the law and doesn’t get in trouble is an impossible task, and if people commit crimes that are worthy of jail time, that’s where they belong. But steps can be taken, both by the criminal justice system and individuals working outside it, to lower the recidivism rate.
Last weekend, the Observer-Reporter and Herald-Standard explored the work that Bentleyville native and former inmate Jeffrey Johnson is undertaking to help people who were in the same spot he was in 2015 – fresh from prison and looking for a new start. He and his wife, Shakira, have been building the Johnson-Shaw Foundation, which aims to help individuals work their way back into society and into productive lives after they are released.
Johnson fully understands how challenging it can be. His troubles started in the early 1990s when he played football for Washington & Jefferson College. A two-decade cycle of drugs and incarceration began. It was finally broken in the early 2010s when Johnson discovered books that had an impact on him while he was jailed, and he became determined to help other inmates to stay out of prison once they gained their freedom.
“There were big opportunities for good but bigger opportunities to fall back into your older habits,” Johnson said.
It’s also been found that education programs within prisons help reduce recidivism. The RAND Corporation found in a 2013 study that $4 to $5 is saved for every dollar spent on educating prisoners. Giving inmates marketable skills when they are imprisoned and helping them get jobs when they are released is another way to stop the revolving door at the jailhouse. Allowing prisoners to maintain family ties, and receive treatment for substance abuse problems and mental illness are also necessary steps to reduce recidivism.
America locks up a lot of its citizens – more than 500 per 100,000 people – and has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Whether society would be better served by alternatives to imprisonment for some offenses is a debate worth having. But it’s clear the rate of recidivism needs to be reduced, and the efforts of Johnson and others to make that happen are laudable.