a public defender

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I have long supported greater prisoner re-entry and rehabilitation programs (as you all may know), so I was happy to see that President Bush will sign the Second Chance Act today.

In a sharp change in attitudes about incarceration, many states and private groups have recently experimented with “re-entry” programs to help released prisoners fit back into their communities and avoid new crime.

The strategy will get a major boost this week. President Bush is to sign the Second Chance Act in a public ceremony on Wednesday, making rehabilitation a central goal of the federal justice system. In a sign of how far the pendulum has swung, the measure passed Congress with nearly unanimous bipartisan support.
With the new law, the federal government is to provide more money and leadership in a field where progress is likely to be difficult at best, experts agree.

The law authorizes the spending of $165 million a year for grants to promote and experiment with support services and methods to assess which offenders are more like to commit more crimes.

So will the passage of this bill have any impact in Connecticut and will Connecticut take re-entry programs and rehabilitation more seriously? It seems that there may be a chance. Mike Lawlor, judiciary committee co-chair, was “active” in the Council of State Governments and he has been pushing for a similar focus on re-entry in Connecticut and will be in attendance at the bill signing ceremony today.

While much of the criminal justice debate in Connecticut has centered around mandatory-minimums and harsh three-strikes laws, there apparently is more going on that the press has not cared to report.

But state House Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero, R-Norwalk, said that behind those disagreements are wide support for re-entry programs backed by Lawlor, co-chairman of the legislature’s judiciary committee.

“We have a ton in common,” he said.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s commissioner of correction, Theresa Lantz, has repeatedly testified in legislative hearings that supervised-release programs are highly effective. Like most governors, Rell has shown little interest in an expensive prison expansion program.

Michael Thompson, director of the Justice Center at the Council of State Governments, said the new push for re-entry programs grew from a realization in the states that a multi-billion-dollar expansion of prisons alone cannot check crime.

Let us hope that this is indeed true and that the legislature will take re-entry seriously. It is foolish to think that we can prevent crime and that the only solution is to lock people up for long periods of time. The sooner we turn our focus and resources to providing released inmates the tools with which to integrate into society, the sooner we start making our communities safer.