Crime

‘First Step’ On A Long Road

Without proper planning, follow through, and training, the First Step Act is doomed to fail.

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Imagine being someplace for years where you have little contact with the real world. You don’t have to cook. You don’t have to earn a living.  Everything is taken care of for you. The only catch is, your every move is watched, and you can’t leave.

Welcome to prison. It’s no vacation. You can only see your friends and family sporadically and so you miss all the major landmarks in their lives — birthdays, weddings, births of children, deaths.  The food is so bad, you save your less-than-dollar hourly wage to buy whatever’s in the vending machines to heat in the communal microwave.

Your cell is outfitted with three things, all cemented to the wall or floor.  A metal cot, metal toilet, and metal sink.  Even outside the cell, there’s not much choice.  There’s a schedule of time when you can go to the cell outfitted with some workout apparatus.  Or you might spend some time in the yard, fenced in by barbed wire. Then there’s the common room.  But careful, if you’re not looking over your shoulder, another inmate could sneak up on you and cut your face with a shiv.

The look and feel of the entire place is institutional grey, punctuated by a photo of the reigning warden or a warning of the consequences of attacking a prison guard. Boredom permeates every waking moment.

Maybe you went in when you were a kid, say 18.  Now, you’re 40 and slated to be released.  You’ve never held a steady job, struggled with drug abuse, and didn’t go to college.  Maybe your parents are dead and your siblings can’t house you.  You’ve worked on your physique — one of the few things you were able to do in jail — but you’ve got no skills to make a living wage.  And you’ve got a felony record, which automatically eliminates your ability to be hired at most workplaces.

Thanks to the “First Step Act” (FSA), a few years have been cut from your sentence time. That’s because the federal government realized that housing people for long terms on non-violent drug offenses is both a financial strain and not fair.  The effort to equalize the sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine shortens your sentence, but you’re being released into a new world.  Smartphones, computer tablets, Netflix, Venmo, iTunes — stuff that never existed when you went in.

You’re a different person than the one sentenced all that time ago.  You’re older and a little wiser. Maybe you found god or Allah, but you’re also finding out that it’s not easy going home, thinking for yourself, having free will.

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So, what’s your first step? Where do you go? How do you handle a world without the regimentation you lived for the past 20 years of your life?

Last week, the federal government released from jail some 3,000 federal prisoners serving sentences for drug crimes as part of the FSA — a bipartisan effort to put more “justice” back in the criminal justice system.  The first step was to identify offenders who qualified for sentence reductions and release them.

But the next step is going to be far more challenging, both for the former inmates, now labelled as felons, and whatever system is implemented to help smooth their transition back to the real world.

Without proper planning, follow through, and training, the First Step Act is doomed to fail as inmates recidivate and naysayers shake their heads with I-told-you-so glee: “See, those people can’t do any better. They should all be put back in prison.”

The government is great at coming up with acronyms to describe “tools” they’ll use to determine which of the newly released inmates are most at risk of reoffending.  For “First Step,” they developed PATTERN: Prisoner Assessment Tool Targeting Estimated Risk and Needs.

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According to the Department of Justice press release:  

PATTERN is designed to predict the likelihood of general and violent recidivism for all BOP inmates. As required by the FSA, PATTERN contains static risk factors (e.g. age and crime of conviction) as well as dynamic items (i.e. participation or lack of participation in programs like education or drug treatment) that are associated with either an increase or a reduction in risk of recidivism. The PATTERN assessment tool provides predictive models, or scales, developed and validated for males and females separately.

It’s useful to have predictors, but even better is to have funds for staff to help former prisoners find housing, get employment, and connect with social services like health insurance, food stamps, and drug and mental health counseling.

Simply moving to another city to change your job requires an adjustment. Imagine the adjustment it takes in leaving jail and going home.  The mere restraint of liberty and arbitrariness of rules and punishment is traumatic, in and of itself, even if one is not subjected to solitary confinement or attack from either other inmates or guards (as many are).

Making the transition from prison will require a lot of handholding.  Ideally the people providing transition help will not come to it with finding fault in mind, but from a perspective offering assistance and guidance — what can we do to boost this person’s chances, so he doesn’t go back to jail.

This is truly a “first step” in recognizing that long prison terms are neither cost-effective nor necessary.  The next steps will determine whether the program is a success or failure.

Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.

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