No Second Chances? Ex-Prisoners Face Mounting Barriers to R

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By ABCNews.com

Published: 01/02/2003

What do you want to know about Nelson Kowalczyk?
His photo, physical description, current address and more are available on the official 'My Florida' Web site.
Why would you want to know anything about Nelson Kowalczyk, you ask? Click past the governor's Hanukkah message and a blurb about the state's 'Reach Out and Read' initiative, and you'll also see that he was paroled five months ago after a 26-year prison stint for murder.
In the name of public safety, a growing number of states are providing details about felons on their Web sites - similar to the sex offender registries available in nearly every state. With more parolees hitting the streets these days after years of rising imprisonment levels, thousands of ex-con profiles are online, with more to come. Most states that make such information available publish it on the Department of Corrections pages of their Web sites.
While victims' rights supporters hail the felon databases as useful crime-fighting tools, ex-offender advocates say they brand parolees with 'scarlet letters.' Ex-offenders certainly face greater problems - the inability to get work, housing or even to vote in some states, for instance - but some say the databases represent an unnecessary 'piling on.'
'We create, in essence, a subclass of citizens called former prisoners who are forever disadvantaged in their efforts to achieve reintegration,' said Jeremy Travis, senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Urban Institute. 'Their sentence is never over.'
Many former prisoners do indeed pose a public safety risk, Travis concedes, and bear responsibility for their own futures. Two-thirds of all ex-inmates will be rearrested, and 41 percent will be jailed again within three years. 'But more attention should be paid to people coming back home,' he said.
Seeking a Fresh Start
Despite his online bio, Kowalczyk is now living a best-case scenario. Fresh from prison after serving a mandatory 'quarter' for what he called a drug deal gone bad, Kowalczyk went to work for Time for Freedom, an Ocala, Fla., residential program that helps ex-inmates ease back into life.
Ocala, home to several halfway houses, is relatively friendly to ex-inmates, he said. Several local businesses, such as the International House of Pancakes, regularly employ Time for Freedom residents, who do everything from laying bricks to flipping burgers. Of course, not everyone warms to the ex-con population. 'Sometimes we run into a brick wall where people aren't sympathetic,' Kowalczyk said.
Still, of the 27 men living at Time for Freedom, all are currently employed.
Even the most recent resident, out less than a week, has a job. 'They've been there and done that and really don't want to go there anymore,' Kowalczyk said of the ready-to-work residents.
Without the backing of a community program, though, ex-inmates face overwhelming, if not insurmountable, barriers to functioning in society and staying out of jail, Kowalczyk said.
'What I've seen, when a guy gets out of prison and he doesn't have a foundation and he doesn't have a support team around him who genuinely cares, especially guys who've done 10 years or more, when he gets out and he doesn't have that support team, he doesn't make it,' he said.
The Revolving Door, At High Speed Easing released prisoners back into society is especially crucial, some experts say, as the number of parolees hits an all-time high. About 600,000 state and federal prisoners were released last year back into their communities - that's roughly 1,600 a day.
The transition from prison to home has never been an easy one, and likely would be difficult under the best of circumstances. But some prisoner advocates and criminologists say America's strict 'law and order' attitude makes it more difficult than it needs to be.
'There has developed a kind of us-vs.-them mentality, almost the case of moving toward a one-strike approach to crime,' said Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
'Functionally, once you've committed a crime, you've joined another category of being. You've moved into this netherworld where you no longer belong to the human community. That damns people long before they've shown themselves to be beyond redemption.
Once you alienate people, they find it difficult to be part of this community,' he said.
As it turns out, just as inmates are coming out of jail in higher numbers than ever, so they return through the infamous 'revolving door.'
The number of parole violators returned to state prisons exploded from 27,000 in 1980 to 203,000 in 2000, a 652 percent increase, according to a recent Urban Institute analysis of U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data. Of the parole violators returned to prison, one-third committed a new offense, and two-thirds committed technical violations.
A Bus Ride and $25
Offender advocates point to state and federal policies that pose challenges to former prisoners trying to make it after jail time, including this list reported by the Urban Institute: Only half of all states report making transportation arrangements for prisoners at the moment of their release. Those that do give rides home from jail often drop ex-inmates off in the middle of the night in locations where they may know no one. *One-third of states provide no funding at all for inmates as they leave prison. Other states offer sums ranging from $25 to $200.
*At least six states bar ex-offenders from public employment.
Federal laws bar many ex-prisoners from public housing and federally assisted housing programs.
*Some states place restrictions on fields of work ex-inmates can pursue, including law, real estate, medicine, nursing, physical therapy and education.
*Four million Americans are currently or permanently barred from voting because of criminal activity. More than one-quarter are black men.
Add to that list the trend of criminal registration. Sex offenders in nearly every state are now required to register. Now, more states are also creating their own databases of other criminals and ex-inmates, like Florida's Corrections Information Network. States with up-and-running offender databases include Georgia, Texas, Indiana, New York, Michigan, Oklahoma, North Carolina and, most recently, Tennessee.
While criminal records are already available to the public, online directories make criminal records accessible in a way that old-fashioned courthouse file rooms do not.
Two-Way Street
Of course, some government programs are designed to aid the transition from prison to home. And, fault also lies with the individual offender.
'Reintegration is a two-way street,' Travis said. 'It requires actions from the returning prisoner and a willingness by society to accept the prisoner back into the community.'
All states have some form of pre-release programs, similar to Time for Freedom in Ocala, ranging from work-release and substance abuse programs to halfway houses. But funding and participation vary widely from state to state, the Urban Institute found. Many transitional centers only serve a fraction of the prison population and limit eligibility for certain offenders.
Not too many Americans probably sympathize with ex-inmates, though, especially when so many people are concerned about education and employment for their own families.
Others wonder whether decreasing the long-term penalties for crime by helping inmates once they are released would actually deter future crimes in the long run - or just make a criminal life more attractive.
'There's a tradeoff; the bigger penalty makes it less likely they'll commit the crimes to begin with,' said John Lott, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. 'If you make it easy for people to get back into the labor market later, you're reducing the penalties they face.'
Americans don't have a choice but to take a gamble on helping inmates become part of society again, Haney said.
'People are very afraid of crime,' Haney said. 'We're willing to do almost anything to minimize the risks of crime. But sometimes we take that so far that paradoxically we create the conditions where more crimes occur rather than less.'

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