It’s always amazing to hear what people think happens in the legal system, and to wonder how it is possible that their ideas could be so blissfully far from reality.  Listening to a presidential-contender who shall remain nameless (to avoid the command that I give equal time to another contender who shall also remain nameless, though she has been rumored to sleep with former President Bill Clinton.  I can say this, as this presents a fairly large universe.), talk about his policy to help former prisoners re-integrate into society.

While the candidate never mentioned what exactly he planned to do to facilitate this re-entry, I was happy to hear it mentioned at all.  This is one of those pesky gaps in people’s understanding of the system that tends to cause problems only for the poor miscreants who have to live through it, their wives, children, some close friends and a few million potential victims of recidivism.  Nothing much there.

Most people have never given this much thought.  The next time you’re at a cocktail party with the Beautiful People, making polite conversation, ask the crowd what they think happens.  Unless Paris Hilton is in attendance, chances are that they say, “Gee, I don’t really know.”  Then ask them to guess.

People generally assume that there is some mechanism to deal with ex-cons.  Jobs, housing, drug and alcohol treatment are the needs, so somebody has to fill them, right?  As noted by Chicago Sun-Times writer Tom McNamee,

We love the front door of a prison, but we hate the back door. We love to spend money to send lawbreakers away, hiring ever more cops, building ever more prisons. But we cheap out on the help they need to go straight when they get out, which is stupid.

Late at night, a bus drops off ex-cons in the Bronx.  Some have family to meet them and bring them home.  Others have no one, and find themselves standing on the street, free-at-last, but without a clue what to do now.  Try to get a job when you’re an ex-con.  Try to buy some clothes to wear when you try to get a job when you’re an ex-con.  Try to get a shower before you put on clothes to try to get a job when you have no home when you’re an ex-con.  Well, you get the picture.

Many “tough-on-crime” people complain that it’s wrong to provide prisoners with an education.  After all, people who live their lives lawfully have to pay for college, yet we give it away to people who commit crimes.  That’s crazy, right?  well, it is unfair in the sense that we penalize people who are honest but poor by denying them a higher education to life themselves out of poverty and make their way into a fulfilling career.  True enough. 

But the reason for giving prisoners an education is not so much for their sake, but for ours.  If they leave prison without the ability to do something, get a job or simply survive on the outside, they are going to return to crime.  The options are limited; commit a crime or starve.  And if they commit crimes, they need victims.  This is where the rest of us come in.  We prefer not to be crime victims, and so it is in our self-interest to help ex-cons lead a law-abiding life.  For those “tough-on-crime” at all costs folks, the alternative is the death penalty for everybody, which may well be okay with them but is too ludicrous to be worth discussing here.

It would be a good think if this extended Presidential campaign seasons makes a little room to discuss what will happen with these ex-cons as the back-end of the prisoner boom of the 1990s is exploding. We were very busy locking them up for a decade, and now they are coming out through the back door.  If this discussion doesn’t happen, and result in some systemic answers, we should expect to have another big problem on the horizon of dealing the product of our conservative politics and knee-jerk solutions to crime.  You go, Barak.  I hope you have some good answers, and I hope the others have something to say about it as well.