Posted on 04/28/2016 1:45:59 PM PDT by jazusamo
First the Obama administration managed to reduce prison sentences as a way of ending racial discrimination and now comes an aggressive plan to meet the “criminogenic needs” of felons by providing them with a series of perks the moment they’re incarcerated. This includes an education, employment and life skills training, substance abuse and mental health plans, building family relationships behind bars and a number of other programs to maximize their likelihood of success upon release.
It’s called the Roadmap to Reentry and it’s part of a Department of Justice (DOJ) initiative to reduce recidivism among ex-cons. Work started around five years ago when the administration created a Federal Interagency Reentry Council to reduce recidivism and improve employment, education, housing and health outcomes of ex-cons. The Roadmap to Reentry is being heavily promoted this week because Attorney General Loretta Lynch has determined that this is National Reentry week. The celebration comes on the heels of the nation’s largest mass release of federal prisoners, freed early by the administration as part of the new relaxed drug-crime sentences. The commander-in-chief and his cohorts claimed the old sentences were too harsh and discriminated against poor and minority offenders. Sentencing reform bills are also pending in Congress and are expected to become law sometime this year.
As he’s done with so many other issues, the president took matters into his own hands back in 2010, enacting a measure that for the first time in decades relaxed drug-crime sentences. This severely weakened a decades-old law enacted during the infamous crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged urban communities nationwide in the 1980s. The U.S. Sentencing Commission lowered maximum sentences for drug offenders and made it retroactive so the feds started discharging the first wave of drug felons last fall who were eligible for early release under the softer rules. In all, around 50,000 prisoners are expected to benefit from the new measure, which has outraged federal prosecutors who warn that drug trafficking is inherently violent and therefore the phrase “non-violent drug offenders” is a misnomer. The nation’s prosecutors also caution that reducing prison sentences for drug offenders will weaken their ability to bring dangerous drug traffickers to justice.
To accommodate the ex-cons, the Obama administration has poured huge sums of taxpayer dollars into job and housing programs that can help them stay out of jail since recidivism is quite common. In fact, Judicial Watch reported last month on a crack dealer freed early as part of the mass release of federal inmates who got indicated for fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend and her two kids in Ohio. Perhaps if this violent criminal had the accommodations provided by the new Roadmap to Reentry he would have stayed out of jail. The new plan takes the administration’s recidivism intervention initiative a step further by starting the process the second a criminal is incarcerated. “Supporting successful reentry is an essential part of the Justice Department’s mission to promote public safety — because by helping individuals return to productive, law-abiding lives, we can reduce crime across the country and make our neighborhoods better places to live,” Lynch states on the agency’s special reentry webpage.
Here’s how it will work; upon incarceration every inmate will be provided with an individualized reentry plan tailored to his or her risk of recidivism and programmatic needs, according to the Reentry Roadmap plan. This means meeting the “criminogenic needs” of every convict in U.S. custody. “While incarcerated, each inmate should be provided education, employment training, life skills, substance abuse, mental health, and other programs that target their criminogenic needs and maximize their likelihood of success upon release.” Each inmate will also be “provided the resources and opportunity to build and maintain family relationships, strengthening the support system available to them upon release.” Lynch has notified governors nationwide to allow cons returning to their communities to exchange their Bureau of Prisons inmate identification card for a state ID. This is critical to a successful “reintegration” because without ID it’s tough to get a job, housing or open a bank account, according to the plan.
The locked-up drug guys will have u believe dealing is the ONLY thing they did wrong.
NOPE..!
In most cases, the cops couldn’t get him on murder (and usually 10 other things) cuz the conviction bar is high; witnesses are afraid, but won’t testify in court, etc.
So the cops give up on murder and simply take the guy down on the druggy stuff —he has it on his person, etc.
It’s WAY more easily proven.
Most of the drug guys in lock up are also MURDERERS.
You nailed it!
Obama is going to ‘educate” them...
Instead of “Ah di du nuffun!!!” they are going to be able to now say, “I didn do nuthin!!!”
Many of these are actually big-time dealers who actually ran huge drug rings complete with ordering hits on competitors. Such charges are far more difficult to prove as well, and so the cops are only able to bust them for some small-time possession-with-intent charge. I got an email a little while ago from the change.org petition site begging for signatures supporting the release of some guy who allegedly got put in for life for a single possession charge; turns out the guy ran a heroin ring for decades.
I don’t mind the idea of education and work in prison. Its better than them sitting around watching TV. For non-violent types, letting them out to work may be a good idea as a way to ease their transition to a halfway house and ultimately, freedom.
Years ago, inmates were taught skills and worked around the prison. Then the do-gooders decided that working was just too much a burden on the poor widdle prisoners so many of the jobs had to be shut down. There used to be prison farms and dairies, wood working, engraving, and license plates. Now, the taxpayers have to pay more for purchased food to be delivered and outside contracts for license plates.
The candidates must QUALIFY for any such program, and must demonstrate a COMMITMENT to the program's criteria. It should be a program designed to help people who really want help, not another slacker's paradise and a way out of the day room every other afternoon.
How do you qualify? You show up at a specified location every day for 90 days straight. No excuses, no tardies, no "dog ate my homework." You are assigned some meaningless task: count the bricks on Block D; how many paces around the exercise yard? get the names and numbers of every inmate on your tier. Complete those tasks on time and conscientiously. Demonstrate that you are not in command and that you're willing to take orders from those who are. Then you're ready to learn.
I would concentrate on the basic three R's, and offer intensive courses in the trades -- carpentry, plumbing, HVAC, welding, wiring, simple auto mechanics, etc.. Any violation of the rules -- showing up late, disrupting class, making shivs in the metal shop -- and you're out.
Do they really think that the answer is training, jobs and free wifi?
The answer is that they don’t have a value system suitable for living in a society with other people. Liberalism has destroyed value systems and substituted selfishness and an expectation of entitlement.
Drug charges are often what are pleaded to when prosecutors are not sure, due to “no snitching” lack of evidence or cooperation from victims, they can get convictions on more serious violent crimes.
I agree with the education and work skills programs and in fact I believe those exist now for actual non-violent inmates in many prisons.
Those programs won’t work for the most part for habitual criminals and gang members and there lies the hangup in my view.
Oh, wait, I guess the visual of hordes of black men working the fields being watched by white field bosses would be a hard sell.
What are the imates going to be trained for? Anyone who has spent time in the Unemployment Job Search Skills classes know full well there’s nothing out there.
I think that the reason for the disappearance of many jobs and educational opportunities in prisons has been much more related to budgets and unions. In some states, unions protested that the inmates were making products in competition with the unions. Also, correctional officers are all in unions, and between their narrow job descriptions and budget considerations, most of the states do not staff the prisons in a way that inmates can be supervised in performing many of the jobs that would seem to be obvious/attractive for the prisons, particularly those you listed, which help the institutions to be self-sustaining.
I personally believe that for many, many inmates, if they had access to more education and jobs within the facilities, it would help to reduce the numbers that re-offend and end up back in prison. JMHO
agree....robbery, assault, burglary...they all go along with a drug life....
Upgrading skill sets:
Organic chemistry synthesis
Pharmaceutical sales
Network marketing
With this program, instead of $50K a year to incarcerate an inmate, between admin and materials costs we’ll probably get the costs up to $175K each, which is a great opportunity for some of 0bamas’ pals who will get multimillion dollar grants to develop and then sell the materials and others to administer the programs. This will provide the inmates with completely controlled circumstances where everything they need will be produced for them; including their food and shelter, and of course transport to their place of “employment” will be trivial....a walk in the park, as it were.
But this has little resemblance to the real world. Because in the real world, your commute train is late, or your crappy car breaks down, or you don’t have time to eat lunch and you are hungry as hell that day and your blood sugar is going nuts just when your boss pressures you with an important deadline. Or somebody steps in front of you in line.
And then they snap and beat somebody’s head in. Beautiful. That’s when the bureaucrats who administer the thing hold a press conference to congratulate themselves for the extraordinary work they are doing, reducing recidivism by 1.73% and promise to conduct a thorough 6-month administrative review of the process in order that this unfortunate experience does not happen again and so they can be held accountable which they will never be.
Color me skeptical that such an inmate can ever be de-conditioned to react violently on the first or second or third piece of real life frustration they might encounter on the outside. Random trivial things that WILL happen with perfect certainty, yet unpredictably. These inmates will be used to total predictability. Forgive the implications, but this is like taking animals in a zoo and dropping them off in the Serenghetti plains. They’ll be food in little time, they will sense this, and then they will revert to their prior behavior. And that behavior will attract the very behavior it is intended to defend against on the part of the predators around them. Any idiot except for the Harvard professors who will be paid enormous sums to develop the programs would be able to see that. Professor Gruber.
Government produced nirvana is such a wonderful thing. For the people who are paid to administer it.
I have to agree, this proposed program will be a bureaucratic catastrophe at taxpayer expense.
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