Prisoner
Re-entry in Public Safety
By Sheriff Michael J. Ashe, Jr.
Several bills are before the
state legislature which relate to the re-entry of offenders into the community.
I wanted to take the opportunity to convey to the citizens that I serve my vision
as regards the best way that we can seek to accomplish offenders re-entering
our communities as law-abiding, productive citizens.
I am in favor of the Sheriff’s Department of
each county being the mechanism of prisoner re-entry into local communities,
including state-sentenced prisoners who are returning to that locale, and I am
in favor of re-entry being a gradual “step down” through lesser levels of
security.
The Sheriffs’ Departments of our
fourteen counties are the proven avenues for prisoners to return to the
population centers from which they come. Because of the local and regional
nature of Sheriffs’ Departments, no Sheriff’s Department facility or satellite
facility is remote from our urban centers.
In addition to this geographic
logic, all Sheriffs are constantly building upon literally hundreds of years of
community partnerships. I have, for instance, at this present moment nearly 300
working partnerships with community agencies, organizations and institutions,
all of which I utilize to help effect the successful re-integration of
offenders into our local communities. In addition, my department is working
daily with all the members of the public safety/criminal justice team in my
region. These longstanding community relationships and partnerships are in some
sense intangibles that one cannot replicate or replace by building a physical
structure, or a system, or a bureaucracy. As I’ve said, the roots of these
partnerships go back literally hundreds of years to the beginnings of our
department in our county.
Sheriffs are experts at re-entry
because they do so much of it. I am just one of fourteen
The best way for our local
Sheriffs to re-enter offenders is through gradually
lessening levels of security, also known as community corrections/intermediate
sanctions. Because there is a misconception that these community
corrections/intermediate sanctions programs are soft on crime, I would like to
address the efficacy, indeed the necessity, of community
corrections/intermediate sanctions as part of a continuum of levels of
incarceration in corrections. The truth is that, quite the opposite of being
soft on crime, operations such as Pre-Release and Day Reporting are indeed
crime-fighting tools. It is common sense that an individual who progresses
through the system by productive and disciplined behavior and graduates to
lesser levels of security, where he can be closely supervised for community
re-entry, is less likely to return to crime and jail.
If
common sense is not enough, I offer you the following statistics: In a study of
releases from the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department in 2007, in the twelve
months after release, 12.6% of those released from Day Reporting were re-
incarcerated for a new crime, as were 14% of those from our Pre-Release/Minimum
Security Center, and 14.7% of those from our Correctional Alcohol Center. Fully
20.7% of those who were released from our higher security main institution were
re-incarcerated for a new crime. That means that those who were released from
our higher security level, those who did not go through step-down lesser levels
of security for re-entry, were re-incarcerated for new crimes at a rate 64%
higher than those released from Day Reporting, 48% higher than those released
from Pre-Release/Minimum Security, and 41% higher than those released from the
Correctional Alcohol Center. How’s that for a testimony to the effectiveness of
step-down levels of security in re-entry.
Each Sheriff should have
the statutory authority to place each prisoner in his custody in the level of
security that best serves both the short term and long term needs of the
community. The long term safety of the community is best served by offenders’
going through the gauntlet of a continuum of lesser security levels, all the
while closely supervised and supported in a gradual re-entry. That’s what works
best and that’s what Sheriffs are trying to do on a daily basis.
Beyond the fact that we know that community
corrections/intermediate sanctions fight crime, they are also extremely cost
effective. Our Pre-Release program, because of its lesser level of
security, costs less per prisoner than medium security, and our Day Reporting
program costs one-fourth of medium security per prisoner.
As someone who has been a
criminal justice practitioner for over 34 years, but also someone elected to
office, I am no stranger to, nor opponent of, the rightful place of our political
system in shaping criminal justice policy. Through their elected leaders and
representatives, the public is able to infuse our laws with sound fiscal
practices, to assure that we have the resources to back up our laws.
It
costs in excess of $120,000 to build each hard cell, and $30,000-$40,000 a year
to operate it. I believe that we should do all in our power to assure that
these hard cells are occupied by individuals who require them.
We as a commonwealth have got to
utilize demanding, smart community corrections/intermediate sanctions programs
whenever we can or all our efforts at prison and jail construction will be as
building sand castles against an incoming tide.
As
in so much of life, the answers in criminal justice do not lie at the extremes,
nor will they fit on a bumper sticker. We have to seek both common sense and
balance in structuring a prisoner re-entry system that best serves the public
safety in a real and sustained way.
Michael
J. Ashe, Jr.
Sheriff
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