DC’s Untapped Solutions for Recidivism

By Emma Kiesling, Roosevelt at GW Member 

The National Institute of Justice  found that within five years of release, about three-quarters of released prisoners are re-arrested. The District of Columbia’s rate of over 60% isn’t much better. Recidivism is a problem communities have long struggled with; returning citizens are often released from jail the first or second time without any prospects for employment.
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The DC inmate population is 89% black, and over half of it of it comes from the wards you’d expect if you’ve been in DC for long enough: wards 7 and 8. In these districts, poorer, African American residents are quickly surrounded by the same environment that drove them to crime in the first place, the mostly African-American jail population is arrested over and over again. Lacking college degrees, high school diplomas, and even GEDs, employment options are slim to none. A criminal record is liable to cut of up to 60% of the job market from a returning citizen. Employment has been shown to significantly reduce recidivism to rates of less than 10%--give people a steady income and they have opportunities to change their patterns of behavior. However, fifty percent of the District’s returning citizens are unemployed.

In fact, the relationship between crime and incarceration is actually pretty complicated. New dealers and offenders quickly take the place of drug offenders who are incarcerated, and much of the District’s jail population is arrested for failure to appear in court or parole violations. The landscape seems pretty bleak—it seems like we must be struggling to find a solution for the quantity of repeat offenders and the frequency of their repetition.

However, over the past few years, a pretty clear picture has emerged of exactly what solutions exist to help conquer recidivism anywhere. It’s a long list of possibilities—the kind of list a district or city can tailor to its specific desires. Programs range from the highly effective educational and vocational training to substance abuse treatment to effective re-entry assistance. The District already offers convicts the opportunity to get their GED while incarcerated, which has as of yet failed to significantly drop recidivism rates.

It is important to keep in mind that the goal of all of these programs from the government’s point of view is fewer inmates. Fewer inmates mean lower costs and a more appealing budget: the ultimate win-win for districts pinched for cash and worried about crime rates. Ronald Reagan boasted about the 34% reduction in California’s state prison population during his tenure as governor, despite his reputation as a hard-liner on crime.

The District can and should implement any or all of these programs to reduce recidivism; they vary in scope and cost but they all have the same goal. When listed, it is evident that thought has been put into just how many ways returning citizens might get help—organizations like ReThink Justice, The Sentencing Project, and the Justice Policy Institute are currently working in the District to educate the public and promote the long list of policies that can reduce recidivism in the District.

How effective are the various programs the District has at its disposal? Educational training, the best-documented form of recidivism reduction, produces a 20% reduction in recidivism on average. Models vary in scope: some train convicts in vocational skills or for their GED, and some go further, providing college courses, since it is challenging for returning citizens to get jobs even if they do have their GED.
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Some of the nation’s most effective programs combine educational and vocational training with housing aid and additional assistance after imprisonment, while returning citizens search for a job. The Last Mile operates out of the San Quentin prison in California and teaches prisoners about technology and business, achieving a stunningly low recidivism rate of 7.1%. With the goal of employment, many programs focus on strengthening the resources and capabilities of halfway houses--one of the most fundamental forms of re-entry assistance.

Additional re-entry assistance reforms include helping returning citizens obtain government-issued ID’s and instituting sealing provisions that will protect people who finish their sentence from employment discrimination based on the past offense. There are numerous policy-side ways to make the re-entry process easier for returning citizens: probation eligibility and parole procedures can have huge effects on the actual incarcerated population.

                                                              Yes, the list of solutions is long.

One of the most effective forms of recidivism reduction is mental health treatment. Mental health treatment programs often take more commitment than other programs, but they make up for it in cost-saving. Mental health treatment has a success rate of 60-80% when applied as preventative care—effective early intervention. Types of mental health treatment range from crisis intervention teams (CIT)—a type of coordinated community policing across public services—to modified therapeutic communities—an intense, closely monitored version of rehabilitation.

Similarly, treatment for substance abuse is also highly effective. Substance abuse treatment programs have yielded up to 30% recidivism reductions in a state context; rather than locking up drug offenders, these programs ensure that individuals are healthy and fit to return to society in a humane, conscientious way that is much more successful than incarceration.

Another approach to drug cases is drug courts, which operate in nearly every state. They are costly up-front but save big in the long run by reducing recidivism in drug cases by keeping individuals in treatment longer and out of jail. In this way, bureaucracy works best when expediency meets effectiveness: drug courts work directly with substance abuse treatment to reduce the incarcerated population and the recidivism rate.

With such an army of solutions at their disposal, why aren’t governments driving down their prison populations in droves? The answer is that many are trying to—they don’t want all those inmates in their jails. But without an insistent public push for reform, progress is slow, clumsy, and prone to helping entities (like governments and private contractors) other than the inmates and returning citizens at the center of this debate. If we speak up about the need for humane solutions to recidivism, the government will listen; it is their win-win. Let’s place the spotlight on recidivism and all the things that can be done about it.