The New York Times editorial urges Congress to provide meaningful funding for the Second Chance Act, passed last year by Congress as part of the President’s prisoner re-entry initiative.  That would be President Bush, by the way.

With the economy in recession, and prison costs rising, states that used to lock up as many inmates as possible are looking for sensible alternatives. President Obama has asked Congress to commit more than $100 million to prisoner re-entry programs, with three-quarters going to the Second Chance Act. That would be a good down payment, but only a down payment, on what is needed.

The editorial describes how two states, Texas and Kansas, both known for their deep and abiding concern for criminal defendants, have implemented aspects of this bill and had significant success in reducing recidivism.  In Texas, according to the editorial, a 25% reduction in parole revocations was achieved within two years of implementation, saving the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

But two years ago, we weren’t in a recession.  With people unemployed, services cut to the bone and businesses failing, the standard complaints will rear their ugly heads:  Why should the hard-earned money of good, law-abiding folks be used to coddle criminals.  Why help them get jobs when we don’t have them.  Why educate criminals when we can’t afford to educate our own children. 

The promise of a safer society and less expensive system in the future has been around for a long time, and even when times were flush, people had a hard time accepting the idea that prisoners were worthy of being helped to re-integrate.  If you think people don’t care much for criminal defendants, they really, really don’t care much for returning prisoners.

The complaints about funding programs to help prisoners return to society as productive, law-abiding citizens present some difficult questions.  Why do we deny education to poor people who’ve committed no crime, yet provide it those who have done harm?  It is a very good question.  We know how it will help the latter, but aren’t the former worthy of help too?  Perhaps even more worthy?

This year’s federal budget will emphasize the allocation of scarce resources, even more so than usual since so much money has already been spent on bailouts, wars and other dubious uses.  The pool is small, and legislators still have to feed though mouths of those who pull their lever in the voting booth.  Can congressmen and senators use this to their advantage?  Can they at least withstand the heat from their constituents?  Will they want to?

Over the past 25 years, society’s view of prisoners has gone from bad to worse.  At one time, a prisoner was someone who paid his debt to society.  Today, he’s someone who has more rights than law-abiding people, being released because of some ACLU conspiracy that prevented his well-deserved execution.   That would end the problem, right? 

Simple Justice, like most criminal defense blawgs, tends to preach to the choir, with only a handful of ignorant nutjobs sticking their two cents in to remind us that we’re evil, our clients are evil, and the country has gone to hell in a handbasket.  Most of the time, we can ignore these loony comments as the reflections of ignorant, self-serving, angry people who feel compelled to lash out at others to compensate for the misery they’ve made of their own lives.  I’m not entirely sure that’s the case when it comes to prisoner re-integration.

While the need and utility for the Second Chance Act is clear, and its benefits likely to far outweigh its costs, it does demand a value judgment be made between using current resources to help those who have committed crimes at the expense of those who haven’t.  A very good argument could be made that if the same resources were put into education, we could prevent many people from engaging in crime in the first place, thus reducing the need for prisoner integration by reducing the number of prisoners in the first place.  The cynical response is that we would never use funds this way; we only throw money at problems, not prevention.  While true, why shouldn’t this be the thrust of re-educating the voter?

We will never eliminate crime, and hence we will always be stuck with the problem of what to do with criminals.  This becomes more of an issue as we increase the number of crimes every time there’s a new name to pin to a law.  Make more conduct criminal and there’s a strong likelihood we’ll have more criminals to deal with.  But the fact remains that we have them now, and need to figure out a way to deal with them after they have completed their sentence and must return to society. 

Oddly, nobody seems to consider why the years of very expensive warehousing of prisoners doesn’t seem to do much to stop recidivism or help prisoners to return to society as productive and law-abiding citizens.  Perhaps the real trade-off is our societal love for retribution at the cost of free college for everyone.  Until we are ready for a serious re-evaluation of what the heck we are doing with prisoners (and I for one won’t hold my breath), the Second Chance Act is a necessary stopgap.  As I said, it’s a start.  And it’s got a much better likelihood of a decent return on investment than saving Chrysler.