No Second Chances?

ABC News ^ | Geraldine Sealey

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Dec. 10 — What do you want to know about Nelson Kowalczyk? His photo, physical description, current address and more are available on the official "My Florida" Web site.

Why would you want to know anything about Nelson Kowalczyk, you ask? Click past the governor's Hanukkah message and a blurb about the state's "Reach Out and Read" initiative, and you'll also see that he was paroled five months ago after a 26-year prison stint for murder.

In the name of public safety, a growing number of states are providing details about felons on their Web sites — similar to the sex offender registries available in nearly every state. With more parolees hitting the streets these days after years of rising imprisonment levels, thousands of ex-con profiles are online, with more to come. Most states that make such information available publish it on the Department of Corrections pages of their Web sites.

While victims' rights supporters hail the felon databases as useful crime-fighting tools, ex-offender advocates say they brand parolees with "scarlet letters." Ex-offenders certainly face greater problems — the inability to get work, housing or even to vote in some states, for instance — but some say the databases represent an unnecessary "piling on."

"We create, in essence, a subclass of citizens called former prisoners who are forever disadvantaged in their efforts to achieve reintegration," said Jeremy Travis, senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Urban Institute. "Their sentence is never over."

Many former prisoners do indeed pose a public safety risk, Travis concedes, and bear responsibility for their own futures. Two-thirds of all ex-inmates will be rearrested, and 41 percent will be jailed again within three years. "But more attention should be paid to people coming back home," he said.

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Interesting conundrum. On the one hand, your children deserve the right to not be victimized by repeat offenders (note: the vast majority of violent crime is committed by repeat offenders.) On the other hand, a guy should be able to have a fair shake if rehabilitated.

Interesting choice of words in the article though, "ex-prisoner." I guess that's an euphemism for ex-con.