It’s been six years since Will Jennings was last behind bars. A former drug addict who spent 13 years in prison over four decades for armed robbery and weapons violations, Jennings is now employed as an outreach worker for a local nonprofit development corporation in Chicago. He is also an amateur actor and is earning his GED in order to become a certified counselor. Since completing a treatment program in 1999 at Illinois state’s Sheridan Correctional Center, the nation’s largest fully dedicated drug treatment prison, he’s drug-free and back in touch with his four children. “I’ve never been a parent, a real parent to my kids,” Jennings says. “But I’m learning every day, and I’m gonna keep learning. I love ’em, and I believe they love me too – the me that’s here talking to y’all today.”
America’s incarceration rate is the highest in the world, and the fallout from our broken criminal justice system touches every aspect of our lives, from community safety to employment to housing. Low-income and minority families feel the effects most severely: Ex-offenders – our own brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers – face daunting barriers to employment and re-integration into community life.
Those hurdles contribute to recidivism: Once we get out of prison, federal rules bar us from returning to our families in public housing, and funding for halfway houses and other residential options is limited, leaving us with few options. We want to be with our families. We want to stay out of prison. We want to move on with our lives. But to do so, we need more support as we re-enter our communities.
In the short term, we ask for a re-examination of mandatory sentencing laws and strict prison sentences for minor crimes and drug offenses. We favor drug treatment and diversion programs that will help reduce imprisonment rates and the repercussions of incarceration. We urge expanded services while we are in prison, including mental health treatment, education, and workforce development, which would help increase our ability to find jobs once we are released. Eliminating the bans on public assistance based on criminal history would help provide a safety net at the critical moment of our release.
We need long-term policies that improve early childhood education and provide mentoring, after-school programs and employment opportunities for our youth and children. Studies such as the Perry School Project show that early childhood education decrease the likelihood of a child’s ever going to jail.
We urge more help for ex-offenders trying to rebuild, and more support for children of incarcerated parents. We would like it to become easier and less expensive to get criminal records expunged. We believe that voting rights be reinstated for ex-offenders once we have paid our debt to society and are released on parole.
We ask our local governments to increase funding for community drug treatment, community revitalization efforts, youth programs and ex-offender re-entry programs. Funding is particularly important at this level because our local governments bear the burden of the costs of incarceration through the management of local jails.
Prevention is crucial to keeping children from getting caught up in the criminal justice system. Ending zero-tolerance policies in schools would decrease the volume of the school-to-prison pipeline.
We appreciate the crucial role states have played in lifting bans on public assistance for the formerly incarcerated, and we ask that they continue to dismantle this harmful policy. States have flexibility in creating re-entry programs and should do their best to create comprehensive programs that work across agencies to make the transition from prison to the community easier for our loved ones.
Studies show that the spike in America’s prison population has more to do with changes in the criminal justice system such as mandatory sentencing, three-strike laws and an increase in adult sentencing for youth rather than an actual increase in crime. More and more of our families suffer through the imprisonment of a parent, spouse, sibling or child in which the punishment is out of proportion in length or harshness to the crime. Such penal policies have resulted in ethnic disparities among the incarcerated and the disenfranchisement of many felons.
Sentencing reform that focuses on treatment and rehabilitation for our imprisoned family members would curb recidivism, make financial sense and help our communities.
The 1996 federal welfare law prohibits anyone convicted of a drug-related felony from receiving federally funded food stamps and cash assistance. States can maintain the federal lifetime ban on cash assistance and food stamps, but they also have the option of passing legislation to limit the ban or eliminate it altogether. Thirty-three states have limited or eliminated the ban.
The recent enactment of the Second Chance Act supports $165 million to help former inmates and increase the rate of successful re-entry. This funding must remain secure despite our current economic crisis.
The 1996 federal welfare law that prohibits former prisoners – our own mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers – from being eligible to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or food assistance makes it harder for them to support their families and move on to secure, productive lives.
We know that building prison after prison to house the growing prison population is not a viable solution. We advocate alternatives: We urge funding for research on rehabilitation and re-entry programs and support for prisoners such as education, job preparation and post-release planning as well as public and mental health assistance.