Both Feet At Once

Nearly each day in December, I feel blindsided as I "rediscover" that the end of year has arrived.  My mind co-opts words from a well-known poem:  "When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but the month of December and the end of the Year." Damn it!

Why is it difficult to grasp the reality of another year whizzing past?  Why is it hard to see days and months swooshing by us, like leaves in some late-fall windstorm?  Perhaps it's because we don't get many reminders the year is whipping along.  We don't get many opportunities to reflect, New-Year's-Eve style, on where we are, and where we want to go.

However, over a few years' time, most of us do figure out what we want to do.  We figure out "what month it is."  Over a few years' time, we see the writing on the wall and, one way or another, and with or without help, we come up with a plan.

Why, then, is it that all of us have yet to wake up to the SICK increase over the last 40 years in U.S. prison population?  We've had 40 years to figure this out!  Yet, in many ways, we just don't get it.  It hasn't dawned on us that, figuratively speaking, "It's the month of December."  Oh, sure, we all know that America has a bad habit of locking people up.  But does anyone know that in 40 years the number of folks has actually risen nearly six-fold?

Take a look at this crazy graph, which I've borrowed from Wikipedia.  America has an "incarceration addiction." The truth is that the number one reason our prisons are overcrowded is the so-called "war on drugs."  In fact, the number of men and women incarcerated due to drug charges increased twelvefold from 1980 to 2003.  At this point, most people behind bars are there for non-violent crimes, swept up in this "drug war."  [Human Rights Watch, 2014] 

Why haven't we woken up to the fact that with its gluttony for incarceration, America has created a huge demographic of permanently and totally disabled persons?  These are the people who are current and former prisoners.  Unless there is a change in the status quo, these citizens will never again hold a living-wage job.  They will rarely, if ever, find housing.  Instead, vilified by everyone, denied opportunity at every turn, the majority will return to crime.  Sound like an exaggeration?  In fact, data just released by the Washington State Department of Corrections shows that more than half of men and women now entering State prisons for new felonies have been in prison before!

Worse, by creating these repeat offenders, our corrections system generates new victims.  It generates millions of dollars of new enforcement, prosecution, and adjudication costs.  And it imposes incredible new incarceration expenses on taxpayers.  For example, in Washington State, each person returned to prison for another year behind bars costs taxpayers an annualized average of $37,785.

This has been going on for decades!  When are we going to wake up to the enormity of the costs, crimes, and lost lives we are creating for ourselves?

Our vindictiveness toward former prisoners and prisoners produces an insane avalanche of new costs that exceeds, in its insanity, the practice of shooting oneself in both feet at once.  The price of our habit of demonizing former prisoners is completely off the charts.

The solution is to demonstrate, conclusively, empirically, that prisoner reintegration services can economically and reliably facilitate former prisoners finding productive lives...while ending the cycle of trauma and taxpayer expenses reinforced by our current approach to corrections.

This is the heart of the Post-Prison Education Program's strategy. We are just beginning Phase III of our strategy, in which we are building a separate organization that will contract researchers to test (and prove beyond a doubt) the Post-Prison Education Program's approach to prisoner reintegration.  That separate organization is the Alliance for Fiscal Responsibility & Public Safety  - funding an experimental study spanning the next four years.  After years of seeking systemic, enduring change in Washington State's corrections methods, we now know this is our only pathway to success.

Reintegration services.  Definitive research.  This is our plan.  We're in this to win.  We're committed: we've now jumped in, with both feet at once.  We look forward to providing you with updates as the year progresses.

Oh yes...Happy 2015!  Together, let's make the most of it!

Peter 

Peter E. Heymann