The lead job in the District of Columbia’s Office of Ex-Offenders has been empty since October. So, everyone knows that 2/3 statistic about former felons returning to prison within six years. But to put that in context, there are about 60,000 ex-offenders in DC, which means that 1 out of every 10 people in the city has been in jail.
All of this has an incredibly destabilizing effect on the communities to which these folks return. They find it difficult to get jobs, to find a place to live they have families to feed or intractable family problems to solve. The skill set one needs to survive in prison is antithetical to the one needed to keep a job or raise a family.
Rodney Mitchell, the former head of the office, complains that the District doesn’t have a state run reentry program and thus no way to deal with the problems that ex-offenders create. Arguably, the most effective work done in reentry right now is being done by non-profits, which have the benefit of dedicated, highly motivated staffs who want to be doing the difficult work of reentry, rather than simply your average government worker. All these organizations do things differently, and that’s both a feature and a bug: these organizations are free to figure out what works and what doesn’t for the particular communities they reside in, but at the same time that means that the skills possessed by those who choose to work in this area aren’t necessarilly transferrable. Put simply, for reentry to work at the government level, the most effective methods have to be organized codified in such a way that an idiot can be trained do it. Any idiot.
For now, that hasn’t happened, and research on which non-profits are and aren’t effective is scant, and something Senator Webb should seriously consider putting money into. But there are reforms that can be made at the city level that affect reentry, particularly with regards to parole. The Urban Institute in particular has put a lot of thought into this subject. Parole, as it functions now, rewards the amount of contact a PO has with an ex-offender. But there’s no real incentive for a PO to ensure that the ex-offender stays straight. His performance is not being evaluated on how effective a PO he is.
