As the Texas legislature targets a wide range of potential programs and departments for the budget knife, some program cuts could cost more than the cuts save, while making our communities less healthy, productive and safe for everyone. Take funding for programs that engage ex-inmates.
Budget cuts slice programs for ex-inmates
In some states, the number of people committing new felonies while on probation or parole has inched up, in part because of cuts to programs that helped former inmates stay out of prison
USA TODAY
By Kevin Johnson
February 10, 2011
NATIONAL — Cuts in probation and parole programs to reconcile state budget deficits could undermine recent successes in shrinking bloated prison populations, criminal justice officials say.
In some states, the number of people committing new felonies while on probation or parole has inched up, in part because of cuts to programs that helped former inmates stay out of prison. Other states are weighing substantial budget cuts to all parts of their criminal justice systems, including probation and parole programs.
Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Center's Public Safety Performance Project, says some of the most successful criminal justice programs launched in recent years are at risk. "The (financial) hole is so deep," says Gelb, whose non-partisan group has helped develop state programs for managing offenders outside prison. "Programs for convicted felons are an easy target."
Carl Wicklund, executive director of the American Probation and Parole Association, says the fiscal crisis is "pushing more people out of prison" with fewer people to supervise them and fewer dollars to support drug treatment, housing and job assistance. "We're setting these people up for failure," Wicklund says.
A report Tuesday by the Council of State Governments Justice Center, a bipartisan group that promotes public safety policy, urged lawmakers to spare programs that have been effective in reducing prison costs.
In Kansas, where officials just two years ago were spotlighting the success of the state's probation and parole strategy in reducing high prison costs, an additional 322 probationers returned to prison for committing new offenses in fiscal year 2010.
Overall, the portion of Kansas probationers who successfully completed their terms dropped to 54% in 2010 from 61% in fiscal year 2008, according to a January state report.
Roger Werholtz, Kansas' former corrections secretary, says the losses are "a casualty of the economic crisis" and stricter sentencing policies that added mandatory prison time for more offenses.
In the past two years, state records show, $10.1 million has been cut from four separate funds that support post-release rehabilitation efforts, including offender re-entry programs that match inmates with jobs, housing,
and substance abuse treatment. An additional $7.2 million in cuts have been proposed for fiscal year 2012, starting July 1.
"I had been getting invited to talk (to corrections officials in other states) about what we did right. Now I spend just as much time talking about what we could have done better," Werholtz says.
In Florida, the number of offenders who committed new felonies while on probation jumped from 7,164 in fiscal year 2007 to 9,000 in fiscal year 2009. The number declined slightly in fiscal year 2010 to 8,440. But Florida Department of Corrections spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger says there is concern that expected cuts to plug a $3.5 billion state budget shortfall could threaten those slight gains.
Among the most closely-watched budget battles, Gelb says, will be in Texas, as the state tries to close a deficit of up to $27 billion. Republican state Rep. Jerry Madden of Plano says cuts would threaten some
of the $240 million in treatment programs for some offenders who, without those programs, would have been ordered to prison.
Madden says the programs also were central to a slight drop in the number of parolees who returned to prison for committing new felonies in fiscal year 2010, from 24,692 in 2009 to 24,239. "We can't afford to go back (to growing prison populations)," he says. "We're not conceding anything yet."
Showing posts with label ex-offenders. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ex-offenders. Show all posts
Friday, February 11, 2011
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Poor folks as criminals?
The longer I work and live in the inner city and the more I observe what low-income people face on a daily basis and how the "non-poor" react to them and their plight, the more convinced I become that most Americans just don't understand poverty.
Poverty results from and is sustained by ill-informed public policy. The criminalization of poverty being a case in point. The move of cities to outlaw many of the unavoidable actions of the poor only serves to deepen the poverty the poor experience. Systemic, "legal" forces serve to institutionalize poverty in urban America.
By now many readers here are rolling their eyes, thinking, "Here he goes again!"
My apologies for coming across like a broken record, but I find it necessary.
If you want to gain a better grasp of what ordinary poor people face in Dallas and the other major cities of the nation, please take the time to read insightful essay that follows.
Some will be surprised to learn how the legal system attacks the poor of all ages and life situations.
This article is worth your time, I promise.
Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
Published: August 8, 2009
IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”
In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.
If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that criminalization inexorably impoverishes them. Scott Lovell, another homeless man I interviewed in Washington, earned his record by committing a significant crime — by participating in the armed robbery of a steakhouse when he was 15. Although Mr. Lovell dresses and speaks more like a summer tourist from Ohio than a felon, his criminal record has made it extremely difficult for him to find a job.
Ehrenreich's article (read more here) is the third so far in a series that helps people like us come to grips with what it means to live in poverty. A Home Spun Safety Net (July 11, 2009) and Too Poor to Make the News (June 11, 2009), the first two installments of her extremely insightful series, should be read carefully by anyone who cares enough about poverty in the world's wealthiest nation to at least make the effort to understand the facts of the matter.
Reactions welcome here, as usual.
.
Poverty results from and is sustained by ill-informed public policy. The criminalization of poverty being a case in point. The move of cities to outlaw many of the unavoidable actions of the poor only serves to deepen the poverty the poor experience. Systemic, "legal" forces serve to institutionalize poverty in urban America.
By now many readers here are rolling their eyes, thinking, "Here he goes again!"
My apologies for coming across like a broken record, but I find it necessary.
If you want to gain a better grasp of what ordinary poor people face in Dallas and the other major cities of the nation, please take the time to read insightful essay that follows.
Some will be surprised to learn how the legal system attacks the poor of all ages and life situations.
This article is worth your time, I promise.
Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
Published: August 8, 2009
IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”
In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.
If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that criminalization inexorably impoverishes them. Scott Lovell, another homeless man I interviewed in Washington, earned his record by committing a significant crime — by participating in the armed robbery of a steakhouse when he was 15. Although Mr. Lovell dresses and speaks more like a summer tourist from Ohio than a felon, his criminal record has made it extremely difficult for him to find a job.
Ehrenreich's article (read more here) is the third so far in a series that helps people like us come to grips with what it means to live in poverty. A Home Spun Safety Net (July 11, 2009) and Too Poor to Make the News (June 11, 2009), the first two installments of her extremely insightful series, should be read carefully by anyone who cares enough about poverty in the world's wealthiest nation to at least make the effort to understand the facts of the matter.
Reactions welcome here, as usual.
.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Garden in the ghetto
Now here is a positive development from South Dallas! Take a look at what people can do by working together! My hat's off to Karen Dudley.
________________________________________________
Bed building and planting day took place at Dallas International Street Church for The Garden: South Dallas, Texas. Community service workers from the City of Dallas Community Court came to help the teams get it done and it was a great day for everyone.
Visit http://www.kdministries.org/ for more information on this community project for the homeless.
________________________________________________
Bed building and planting day took place at Dallas International Street Church for The Garden: South Dallas, Texas. Community service workers from the City of Dallas Community Court came to help the teams get it done and it was a great day for everyone.
Visit http://www.kdministries.org/ for more information on this community project for the homeless.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Strength
Strength.
Funny, isn’t it, how authentic strength is so often discovered after times of brokenness and weakness?
I’ve seen this dynamic at work here at Central Dallas Ministries again and again over the last fifteen years.
At times, the principle can be observed organizationally. We’ve come through many challenging times as we’ve faced the harsh realities associated with extreme poverty, lack of opportunity, systemic injustice and insufficient resources to do what was most needed at the time. In every case, we’ve come out “on the other side” a stronger, more informed and fully determined team of people dedicated to the importance of community development and connecting people to people across all sorts of barriers and dividing lines that sap strength from us all.
Then, on many other occasions, I’ve observed amazing strength emerging from weakness in the lives of individuals who’ve come into the world of CDM.
Today, I’m thinking of Lloyd.
When he first came to the Food Pantry, Lloyd was just out of prison. A big, strong, street-wise, cynical and scheming fellow, Lloyd asked us for food and accepted our invitation to volunteer to help the community. He later confessed to me that his real intentions were to “scope us out and steal us blind.” He intended to steal food out the back door, sell it on the street and feed his hungry drug habit.
On that first day, Lloyd worked in the warehouse stacking food and unloading our large delivery truck. At the end of that first day, Lloyd experienced a feeling he had not enjoyed in a long, long time.
He told me, “I felt like I had done something worthwhile, like my day made a difference. I still hadn’t given up my plan to steal the food, but I felt something very new.”
Adding to Lloyd’s confusion, Marva Epperson, director of the food handling process at the time, approached him at the end of the day and invited him to come back the next day.
“Larry, do you know how long it had been since I had been ‘invited back” anywhere! Most people would run when they saw me coming!” he told me months later.
Before long, Lloyd was helping with just about every task, including organizing the warehouse, driving the delivery truck—he’d worked as a truck driver before going to prison—and even attending the Central Dallas Church.
Lloyd ended up being released from probation and its supervision earlier than anyone in memory here in Dallas County.
He maintains his sobriety today. He was united with his family, landed a permanent job driving a truck again, became a leader in the church and continues to live in his hard-won, new-found, authentic strength.
Lloyd provides an example of a tough, broken man who found his way to strength in community.
This is our work.
.
Funny, isn’t it, how authentic strength is so often discovered after times of brokenness and weakness?
I’ve seen this dynamic at work here at Central Dallas Ministries again and again over the last fifteen years.
At times, the principle can be observed organizationally. We’ve come through many challenging times as we’ve faced the harsh realities associated with extreme poverty, lack of opportunity, systemic injustice and insufficient resources to do what was most needed at the time. In every case, we’ve come out “on the other side” a stronger, more informed and fully determined team of people dedicated to the importance of community development and connecting people to people across all sorts of barriers and dividing lines that sap strength from us all.
Then, on many other occasions, I’ve observed amazing strength emerging from weakness in the lives of individuals who’ve come into the world of CDM.
Today, I’m thinking of Lloyd.
When he first came to the Food Pantry, Lloyd was just out of prison. A big, strong, street-wise, cynical and scheming fellow, Lloyd asked us for food and accepted our invitation to volunteer to help the community. He later confessed to me that his real intentions were to “scope us out and steal us blind.” He intended to steal food out the back door, sell it on the street and feed his hungry drug habit.
On that first day, Lloyd worked in the warehouse stacking food and unloading our large delivery truck. At the end of that first day, Lloyd experienced a feeling he had not enjoyed in a long, long time.
He told me, “I felt like I had done something worthwhile, like my day made a difference. I still hadn’t given up my plan to steal the food, but I felt something very new.”
Adding to Lloyd’s confusion, Marva Epperson, director of the food handling process at the time, approached him at the end of the day and invited him to come back the next day.
“Larry, do you know how long it had been since I had been ‘invited back” anywhere! Most people would run when they saw me coming!” he told me months later.
Before long, Lloyd was helping with just about every task, including organizing the warehouse, driving the delivery truck—he’d worked as a truck driver before going to prison—and even attending the Central Dallas Church.
Lloyd ended up being released from probation and its supervision earlier than anyone in memory here in Dallas County.
He maintains his sobriety today. He was united with his family, landed a permanent job driving a truck again, became a leader in the church and continues to live in his hard-won, new-found, authentic strength.
Lloyd provides an example of a tough, broken man who found his way to strength in community.
This is our work.
.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Everywhere
It always happens. No matter where I am, it happens. It has been happening for as long as I can remember. For years and years now.
I've noticed that it often happens when things are complicated or when I have been distracted by something selfish or when I am supposed to be "away" from things.
My family has grown so accustomed to it that it has become a family joke of sorts--not exactly the right language, but I struggle to describe it. My daughters grew up watching it. My wife has seen it everywhere we go.
Whatever.
It happens to me again and again.
And, it happened again last Friday night when I stopped to get gas just across the street from the hospital where my dad is recuperating from surgery.
Now get the picture. This gas station is located in an extremely affluent part of our region.
For some reason the credit card reader on the gas pump wasn't working. So, I had to go inside to pay in advance. I first noticed the gentleman as I walked inside. He saw me and I realized that he saw me.
But, I thought, "Here I am in northwest Plano. This is one of the wealthiest parts of the Metroplex. . .surely there aren't panhandlers up here!"
I knew I was wrong, as I rehearsed my foolish logic with the little person living inside my head. Do you have one of those annoying little creatures in your life/head?
When I returned to my car to complete the fueling process, he approached me.
"Sir, good evening," he began. "I was telling that other gentleman that I'm trying to get enough money to get home to Greenville, Texas. I was wondering. . . ."
I cut him off.
"Don't go there, friend," I told him. "I am going to help you out, but don't give me any 'baloney' (not exactly what I said) because I know game and I'm not needing any game tonight!"
"Where you from, man?" he asked me with a smile breaking across his face.
"I live in Downtown Dallas in the 'hood," I replied. "I know game. But, tonight I'm not playing. So, why don't we start again and you just tell me what's going on and what you are trying to do tonight."
"I just got out of prison," he told me, as he pulled out his Texas Department of Corrections identification card. "I'm trying to get a bus pass, something to eat, and a job."
At this point I was encouraged by his complete candor. Refreshing for us both, it seemed.
"I run an inner city ministry Downtown," I told him. "You need to come see us because we have lots of possibilities for you."
I explained all of the options we could make available to him, if he chose to take advantage of them.
"When you say housing, you aren't talking about the shelter are you?" he asked with a frown of concern.
"No, no," I assured him. "I'm talking about an apartment of your own--permanent supportive housing."
"That's what I need. . . and a job, but when you get out and tell people what I've told you, man, people just turn away and won't give you the time of day."
I didn't have a business card. Drat! So, I wrote down contact information and handed it back to him, explaining that I was only out in Plano because of my dad's hospitalization across the street.
"You don't want to go back to prison," I told him. "You and I know one slip up and you are going back. Black folks end up inside a lot more often than people like me!"
He laughed a long laugh.
"I haven't met a white man who talks like you," he said.
"Thanks to friends like you, it has developed over the years, believe me. What were you in for?" I asked.
"Robbery," he confessed. "It's hard without a job. You can make so much more doing bad. I don't want to go back, man."
We talked about racism, faith, Jena, Louisiana; prison, friendship and finding a new chance.
We'll see.
.
I've noticed that it often happens when things are complicated or when I have been distracted by something selfish or when I am supposed to be "away" from things.
My family has grown so accustomed to it that it has become a family joke of sorts--not exactly the right language, but I struggle to describe it. My daughters grew up watching it. My wife has seen it everywhere we go.
Whatever.
It happens to me again and again.
And, it happened again last Friday night when I stopped to get gas just across the street from the hospital where my dad is recuperating from surgery.
Now get the picture. This gas station is located in an extremely affluent part of our region.
For some reason the credit card reader on the gas pump wasn't working. So, I had to go inside to pay in advance. I first noticed the gentleman as I walked inside. He saw me and I realized that he saw me.
But, I thought, "Here I am in northwest Plano. This is one of the wealthiest parts of the Metroplex. . .surely there aren't panhandlers up here!"
I knew I was wrong, as I rehearsed my foolish logic with the little person living inside my head. Do you have one of those annoying little creatures in your life/head?
When I returned to my car to complete the fueling process, he approached me.
"Sir, good evening," he began. "I was telling that other gentleman that I'm trying to get enough money to get home to Greenville, Texas. I was wondering. . . ."
I cut him off.
"Don't go there, friend," I told him. "I am going to help you out, but don't give me any 'baloney' (not exactly what I said) because I know game and I'm not needing any game tonight!"
"Where you from, man?" he asked me with a smile breaking across his face.
"I live in Downtown Dallas in the 'hood," I replied. "I know game. But, tonight I'm not playing. So, why don't we start again and you just tell me what's going on and what you are trying to do tonight."
"I just got out of prison," he told me, as he pulled out his Texas Department of Corrections identification card. "I'm trying to get a bus pass, something to eat, and a job."
At this point I was encouraged by his complete candor. Refreshing for us both, it seemed.
"I run an inner city ministry Downtown," I told him. "You need to come see us because we have lots of possibilities for you."
I explained all of the options we could make available to him, if he chose to take advantage of them.
"When you say housing, you aren't talking about the shelter are you?" he asked with a frown of concern.
"No, no," I assured him. "I'm talking about an apartment of your own--permanent supportive housing."
"That's what I need. . . and a job, but when you get out and tell people what I've told you, man, people just turn away and won't give you the time of day."
I didn't have a business card. Drat! So, I wrote down contact information and handed it back to him, explaining that I was only out in Plano because of my dad's hospitalization across the street.
"You don't want to go back to prison," I told him. "You and I know one slip up and you are going back. Black folks end up inside a lot more often than people like me!"
He laughed a long laugh.
"I haven't met a white man who talks like you," he said.
"Thanks to friends like you, it has developed over the years, believe me. What were you in for?" I asked.
"Robbery," he confessed. "It's hard without a job. You can make so much more doing bad. I don't want to go back, man."
We talked about racism, faith, Jena, Louisiana; prison, friendship and finding a new chance.
I handed him a twenty and he shook my hand and smiled a huge smile.
"I ain't going back," he declared.
I watched him walk away. He retrieved his backpack from the side of the station. He walked away into the night with what appeared to be a confident stride.
It always happens to me.
I wish people weren't facing what that gentleman faces. I hope he will come by and hook up with us. It is good to imagine what we could discover together. I hope he believed me.
I wonder if he has any real reason to take me at my word.We'll see.
.
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