Backing them up for about the past year, the United States Bureau of Prisons is about to cut them loose. The number given is 6,000, all prisoners whose time was prolonged in the name of crack exceptionalism, which only made sense to people who accepted the premise that longer is better, no matter what.
One day, the United States Sentencing Commission came down off its high and realized their numbers were crazy and even their friends and admirers no longer wanted to pay for its incarceration addiction. So, they agreed to let them go, but kick the actual can down the road until they could find some plausible deniability. The day is finally coming. The exodus will be televised. October 30th to November 1st.
Dara Lind at Vox offers a ‘splainer on the release, though its more of an ‘scuser than anything else.
Yes, 6,000 is more prisoners than the federal government has ever released early at once before. Typically, the federal government releases 55,000 prisoners a year — so the prisoner release at the end of this month is doing in a few days what the government typically does in about five weeks. (Unsurprisingly, federal releases are only a fraction of all prisoner releases: 10,000 people are let out of prison in the US every week, but most of those are state prisoners.)
But only 4,000 or so of those are actually going to be released into society.
If you get the sense that Lind is trying to downplay the fear that they’re going to fling open cell doors and let the marauders out to rape and pillage, she is. And she’s not alone. The “10,000 prisoners released every week” number, for example, is irrelevant, but does serve to relieve some of the fear and tension.
For people whose only concern is their own safety from any potential harm, real or imagined (a/k/a Americans), this opening of the fire hose scares the bejeezus out of them. Whether it’s 6,000 or 4,000 (and the reduced number isn’t a real number, but an estimate that may be good or may be utterly baseless, since nobody who might actually know is talking), it’s a lot of criminals. Scary.
It’s all nonsense. Not, as the New York Times would have it, because it’s “justice,” but because these aren’t vicious, violent criminals in the first place. They weren’t a threat to anyone before, and still aren’t. They sold drugs for money. They didn’t rape your children.
And let’s not forget, they already served a very long sentence, rather than the absurdly very long sentence originally imposed. The release only eliminates the absurdly on the back end, after the very long sentence has been completed.
But that doesn’t address a far more serious problem with the release.
The remaining 4,000 won’t exactly be set free without guidance. They’ll all be under some form of supervised release. Thousands of them are already in halfway houses or under home supervision, and the rest are being sent there.
This isn’t to say that all of them will get the supervision they need to transition to the real world: For someone who’s been in prison since before the advent of the smartphone, even getting to a halfway house to check in can be overwhelming. Since this is the largest single release of prisoners in history — and because it’s happening on top of the thousand-plus regularly-scheduled releases from federal prison each week — it will be an interesting test of how well suited the federal criminal justice system really is to helping prisoners reenter society.
“Interesting” isn’t a word one wants to hear associated with a mass release of prisoners. Even with a year to prepare for the weekend from Hell, there won’t be beds in halfway houses, probation officers with tons of empty time on their hands, advocates to drive them from the prison door to their new home, therapists to calm their fears of entering a foreign world.
You know how employers have been knocking down the doors of people who never went to prison because they have jobs aplenty they just can’t fill? Right. These newly released, whose iPhone skills are a bit rusty, whose manners are a bit rough, whose education isn’t ivy league (though that may not be a neg), might not find the required jobs they so desperately need. And there won’t be P.O.s to help them.
To the extent there is anything good to say, it’s that prisoners have been coming out with little support forever. Society doesn’t like them and lacks any particular interest in helping them. There’s a good argument: why should criminals get beds and jobs when kids who committed no crime can’t get help? The best response is that prisoners need it more, and if they don’t transition to a law-abiding life, gain a vested interest in society by a decent job and the ability to survive, they’re going back to crime.
Don’t get all huffy about it. It’s not that they necessarily want to be recidivists, but when there is no other option, and a guy’s gotta eat, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think they’re going to starve under the bridge where they’re sleeping just so you can sleep soundly at night?
Is another 6, or 4, or some other digit, thousand releasees on top of the regular number that they already can’t accommodate going to be a problem? Of course it will, but not exactly the problem that nice people worry about. The problem is that we will fail them by providing no means of their transitioning from prison life to freedom as a productive member of society.
Sorry if you don’t want to spend the cash, but that’s part of the cost of locking everybody up for a very, very long time. When they get out, they’re still our problem, and we still have to finish the job that mass incarceration started.
There is one final abiding sense that comes of this release, that maybe those in charge of the system want these released prisoners to fail, to prove that our sentences of a gazillion months in the hole were right all along, and that we need to return to incapacitation to keep these recidivist animals from breaking down your door at night. If so, they couldn’t have set up a mass release any better.
“When the get out, they’re still our problem, and we still have to finish the job that mass incarceration started.”
1. Should be “they,” not “the.”
2. When, exactly, is the job finished? When every parolee has a job, a house, a support group, a retirement plan? At some point, society’s increased obligation to those whom it has previously incarcerated has to end.
That’s a good question, although your examples are result oriented rather than process oriented. No one argues that they should be guaranteed a job and a retirement plan. But federal defendants aren’t just cut loose. They then begin a term of supervised release under the purported guidance of a probation officer. They should have a place to live and be given the tools (training, healthcare, transportation, clothing,) to get a job. There are remarkably few defendants who walk out of prison after a decade and have a job and home before their first nightfall.
If one excepts those who are hired and housed by friends and family, I find it remarkable that any in that cohort would have a job and home before nightfall.
Societies increased obligation should end at a time proportional to the incarcerated societal debt repayment. Should we as a society increase their repayment after incarceration with registries and stigma, then i posit that our obligation to them also increases.
When a person’s realistic options are to either violate the law (and have a place to live and food to eat) or be homeless and hungry, at least some of them will decide to violate the law and have a home; it is irrational for us to assume otherwise.
Regardless of the choice they make, though, I strongly suspect the cost of further incarceration or homelessness is greater than the cost of assisting in their re-integration to society. Is our goal to continue to lecture people who have made bad decisions in the past or reduce recidivism? If we want to reduce recidivism, we should consider doing things that broaden and deepen their options for employment and success when they are released from prison.
Instead, we have registries and the scarlet letter F for the rest of their lives.
Maybe we should have a new hashtag campaign of #FelonLivesMatter.