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Barred from Life
by Sr. Mary Ann McGivern
When men and women are released from prison, most of them go back. Recidivism rates nationally run between 65% and 75%. In fact, they may be even higher, because county jail stays are more difficult to count than state and federal sentences. So who manages to stay out — and why do so many people return to prison?
What People Need
Everybody needs family and community support, money, education, a job and health care. The people who manage not to be incarcerated again have these resources, or most of them.
I work at Project COPE, a small re-entry program. We match people getting out with partnership teams, mostly from faith congregations: Muslim, Jewish and the range of Christian churches. Our recidivism rate over the past three years is less than 5%. Over our 24-year history, it is 14%. This is a terrific success story: 85% of the people who go through COPE’s program won’t go back to prison. And COPE is not unique. Many programs in St. Louis and across the country have success like ours.
Recently, the criminal justice system has begun looking at what the non-profit sector does, which is essentially "personalism." Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day were right! And criminal justice, also known as corrections — both terms fraught with irony — is also looking at what doesn’t work. For example, a lot of people thought boot camp was a great idea. Make them get up at 6 a.m., do calisthenics, run laps. Boot camp graduates have a 90% recidivism rate. It doesn’t work.
Addiction
Another thing that doesn’t work is incarcerating people for drug and alcohol addiction. Punishing addicts is the least effective recovery intervention. Failed drug tests are cause for parole revocation. (“Dirties” is what the inmates and parolees call them.) So is being picked up on a street corner alongside a dealer. Possession is a new charge. But when the going gets tough in civil society, those drug and alcohol cravings grow, and the going gets even tougher very quickly.
Treatment programs in the community — so the person is not separated from family, work, church and friends — have a success rate of 20 to 60%, depending on many factors. But they are better than prison. Nonetheless, the biggest reason for being sent back to prison is addiction and related criminal activity, such as possession, petty burglary and DWI. These crimes are expensive to the community, but re-incarceration costs more. There are better ways.
Employment Issues and Obstacles
It has always been tough for a felon to find a job. Today, it’s even tougher, for two reasons. The first is, of course, the economy: Jobs are scarce. The second is that it is routine for employers to inquire about and check for felony convictions.
There’s rarely a time limit on these checks. Job applications used to ask for recent convictions, say in the past seven years, if they asked at all. And it used to cost a fee and be difficult to find past felony convictions. Today, the Missouri Department of Corrections has mug shots and convictions of everybody in prison and on probation and parole on its website. A new free site, funded by advertising — criminalsearches.com — collected county and state criminal records across the nation, including many traffic and misdemeanor charges. So much for serving your time and getting a fresh start!
Additionally, there is a bevy of regulations and restrictions. In the City of St. Louis, for example, no one with a felony conviction may be hired to work at any business with a liquor license, including grocery stores. So someone who received a suspended sentence for fighting or burglary at age 18 can’t work, 20 years later, as a produce clerk in a city Shop 'n Save. They can work for Shop 'n Save in St. Louis County, but not in the city. The state licensing bureau decides, case by case, whether to allow felons to take licensing exams in fields like cosmetology and health care, but one of the major regional hospitals won’t hire felons, with or without licenses, even to do laundry.
Project COPE offers a year-long program of support specially suited for men and women who committed violent crimes as teenagers, served long sentences, and have strained or limited family relationships. They have gotten almost no work experience and very little vocational training in prison. Two years ago, as a budget measure, the DOC ended GED (high school equivalency) programs in all maximum-security prisons on the grounds that those inmates wouldn’t be needing a high school diploma. But 98% of all inmates will be released – and during their incarceration, education can give meaning to their lives.
Two women I’ve accepted were arrested at ages 15 and 16 and received 18- and 20-year sentences. Women’s prisons have college programs, but these two, who are both very bright (and both African-American, which may or may not be pertinent), got their GEDs but were denied college on the grounds that their sentences were too long. So at 32 and 30, they were released on parole with a year's experience working in the kitchen, two years as groundskeepers, laundry workers, canteen workers — in short, not much to build a life on.
The First Day Out
When men and women come to COPE from prison, almost all of them tell me how afraid they are: of being outside a closed system, being identified by strangers as different, having to look for a job, having to meet their families. To us, the first day out sounds busy, though not frightening. But everything about these first days is alien to released prisoners.
The Missouri prison system does not tell inmates more than a few days in advance how their release will take place. Then they get clothes from the prison clothing room. (Prison grays belong to the state, so if there is no family to send a box or clothes, prisoners rely on donations. A Farmington prison case worker called me once to ask if I would organize clothing donations for their men. Way more than I could do.) They are also told whether they are traveling by bus or train and what time they will arrive. While they are given no money, if they have a little in their account, they get a $5 or $10 DOC debit card — which is no use at all for a phone call from the bus station. Some may have saved as much as $50 or $100. The fare is deducted from those savings, which are usually sent later by check.
Because many prisons are in distant rural areas, it’s an hour or more drive to the depot, and then two or three hours to their destination. They start very early in the morning, feeling awkward about their ill-fitting clothes and boxed belongings, sure everyone is looking at them. They arrive in St. Louis around noon time, hungry, and must immediately see their parole officer. A team partner or COPE staffer meets them at the bus station, takes them out to lunch and drives them to the parole office; they generally continue on to City Hall for a birth certificate and then a state ID and Social Security card.
In order to start their job search as soon as possible, they need a state ID. The Department of Corrections has a plan to release inmates with state IDs, but most people still arrive at COPE needing their birth certificate ($15 from City Hall or $48 from an online service for other states) and Social Security card, in order to get that state ID ($11). They need a bus pass ($60). They need clothes from the thrift store ($20) and shoes ($40). We want them to get a library card.
The person needs to come to COPE, get keys to their apartment, review and sign the housing contract, deposit their meager belongings, and purchase groceries — a mind-blowing excursion because of all the choices.
On the first night alone in their own apartment, most don’t sleep. If the sink leaks, they often won’t tell us for fear they’ll be blamed.
About 3,000 released prisoners come to St. Louis each year. Most go to their families, who often don’t have the resources to buy all these things. About 1,000 go to the St. Louis Release Center, a custodial minimum-security parolee site, which provides bed and board and little else. Some of them find their way to programs like COPE.
The Intervention Fee
People released from prison often owe a lot of money: child support (it can be in the tens of thousands of dollars), restitution, court fees, and unpaid bills. The Department of Justice released a white paper last year documenting the burden that these debts place on men and women just out of confinement. But in 2006, the Missouri Legislature added the Intervention Fee, $30 a month to be paid by everyone on probation and parole. Missouri collects about $15.5 million each year, even though one-third of parolees are more than four months behind in payments.
The Intervention Fee was intended by law to provide community intervention services: drug and alcohol rehab, anger management, psychiatric beds. It does cover the costs of electronic monitoring and staying at the Release Center. (Parolees used to have to pay $10 a day, and they couldn’t get off monitoring or move out of the Release Center until the bill was paid.) The Intervention Fee pays for some inpatient psychiatric and addiction treatment. But this year, $12 million of the unspent funds is purchasing a new computer system and laptop computers for the Department of Corrections, even though the law said specifically that the money was to be used to provide community services for probationers and parolees.
Thirty dollars a month is a lot of money if you have nothing.
Opportunity Costs: Self-Knowledge
Gradually, I’ve come to understand the impact of incarceration on men and women who were locked up at a young age for 10 years or more. Most of those who come to COPE had very limited experiences at home, in school and in their neighborhoods. Think of how you grew in your understanding of yourself in high school, college, your first job, your marriage, your first child — all of this before you turned 30.
When someone comes to COPE at 30 or 36 or 53, all incarcerated as teens, their growth has been stunted. (The 53-year-old committed a murder at 18 and served 34 years; he was released this past July 2. I’ve accepted a 34-year-old man who was 14 when he killed his boss.) They are eager to learn and to work, and they want to do what’s right. But they don’t have any experience trusting anybody. They don’t know how to ask for advice or to assess what advice is worth taking. They don’t know how to make plans, much less make adjustments to what plans they have. They don’t know what choices are open to them, how to test careers or even test changes in their own personality.
Prison is a rigid social system. It’s not a place to experiment with expressing feelings, being more enthusiastic or practicing generosity.
I suspect that one of our clients intimidated others in prison. He’s big and that’s how he got by. But he’s actually timid and fearful of rejection. And he would like to discuss books — but he has never done that and doesn’t know how.
One of the women regressed from 32 back to 15 when she got out. She was impossible, refusing to participate in planned events, accusing everyone else of everything from lies and drug use to selfishness and lack of compassion. It took her four months to settle in and cooperate with us. And she was easier than most because her opposition was so open and explicit. It is much more difficult to work with someone who is secretive and aloof or cooperative on the surface, but unrevealing of self.
Making Decisions and Long-Range Plans
Prisons severely limit the opportunities of inmates to make decisions. They don’t have to decide when to go to bed, how to do a job, what to cook for dinner or whether to ask for a raise. One COPE graduate, James, was driving the car in a drive-by shooting when a person was killed. James was 17 and served 14 years in prison. He got out on September 1 and went directly to Forest Park Community College to take the entry test (required for those with GED or high school equivalency certificates). He had a plan: to become a funeral director, a business in which a felony conviction would not matter. He got a night shift job as a welder for minimum wage. Today, three years later, he’s in the mortician program, doing well. But he says that first year at COPE was the hardest year of his life. I would have thought that the first year in prison would be the hardest, or maybe the last year, with the anticipation of getting out, but I’ve come to understand that decisions during the first year wear folks down.
Community Organizing
One thing people in prison don’t get to do is community organizing. Just try to run a petition drive for better food or playground access for your children during their visits. It will be solitary confinement for you.
When people get out, they have a grasp of injustice, but no sense of how to go about changing small things, much less social systems.
Recently, I’ve been looking for money to teach them some advocacy skills. I want to bring in local organizers on, say, a Saturday morning, and pay the ex-offenders a stipend to attend. Anybody who attends four sessions would be eligible to represent COPE at advocacy meetings around St. Louis and in Jefferson City, again for a small stipend.
That’s one idea. Another is to buy a cheap Rally’s franchise so we could guarantee jobs on the day folks get out. We could also develop more housing. COPE owns ten apartment units, available for up to eight months. Housing First is the concept that people need safe, secure housing first, then the other things will follow.
COPE only serves about 50 people a year. I’ve helped put together the resource list in the Round Table centerfold. It’s limited, meant to be useful in your research as well as your practice.
Mary Ann McGivern is still gardening. At COPE and home, the front yards have been blooming continuously all summer – bulbs, spirea, roses, daisies, lilies, hibiscus, asters, mums and more.
