Free Locked Down, Locked Out by Maya Schenwar Page A

Kayla back to incarceration, again and again, is hardly unique: More than 4 out of 10 ex-prisoners return to prison within three years. 2 Many more come close: A recent Bureau of Justice Statistics study showed that within that three-year timeframe, 67.8 percent of released prisoners were rearrested. 3 While some recently released prisoners are arrested for new offenses, others are reincarcerated for violating the conditions of parole, which may impose curfews, restrict whom the parolee can associate with, or confine where they can live or work. A failed drug test is a sure-bet violation.
    At one point, I ask Kayla whether her parole officer provides any support in her job search or her quest to get sober. She laughs a little and says that, when it comes down to it, there’s one main point to his job: to “violate” her if she messes up. Soon after, my mother, attempting a last-ditch effort to engage the court system in getting Kayla on track, asks Kayla’s parole officer whether the state might be able to help find her a rehab placement. “Nope,” he says. “But what I can do is violate her. Do you want me to do that?”
    Decisions about whether to “violate” a parolee are largely up to the discretion of the officer, which leaves a wide, uncheckedfield open for racist determinations. A 2009 Colorado study showed that black parolees were eight times more likely to have their parole revoked by the parole board than their white peers. 4 The study’s author, Professor Sarah Steen, noted, “We feel confident in saying that race seems to be an important factor in parole revocation decision making.” And so, for a huge number of prisoners, the door out of prison is a revolving one.
    Looking at the rate at which released prisoners are sent back to prison isn’t an ideal way to gauge the “success” of the system. It would be better determined by whether those being released are able to build fulfilling, happy, well-fed, healthy, well-housed lives that contribute to the good of humanity, liberated from both official and unofficial forms of oppression—including targeting by police. But recidivism rates are really the only widespread quantitative data we have on the topic, and they do tell us something about whether people released from prison have shifted out of the circumstances that got them locked up. Alex Friedmann, my pal at Prison Legal News , points out that looking at recidivism is important because it measures whether the “justice” system is accomplishing its own stated goals. The main stated goal: preventing people from doing the things that led to their incarceration.
    Alex’s verdict on how the system is faring at its own game? “If a company produced cars and 43 percent of them were defective, the company would go out of business,” he tells me, alluding to one of the most conservative reincarceration estimates, from the Pew Center on the States. 5 “No one would buy those cars. But that’s how we operate our criminal justice system.”
    What does that mean for those of us on the outside? Let’s consider another number: Ninety-five percent of prisoners will, at some point, be released. If prison makes us feel more secure because it disappears the “troublemakers” from our midst, whatdoes it do for us if those of them who’ve committed harmful acts in the first place are likely to continue doing so once they reappear? If my sister’s ex-boyfriend, incarcerated for residential burglary, is breaking through my parents’ window upon his release, what does that say about that feeling of security? Upon checking her ex-boyfriend’s record in June 2013, I discover he’s now in the county jail, awaiting sentencing on a theft charge ... and he’s been incarcerated for robbery, burglary, and battery at various times throughout the past sixteen years. Once he’s sentenced and spends yet another two or three or four years isolated from society, what are the chances this man will emerge