Breaking the Cycle

Yesterday I was talking with my court administrator about problems facing the judiciary and we agreed that recidivism is probably the most serious and difficult to address.

A key reason is that nearly 70 percent of the felony detainees in our Fulton County Jail are on medications for various mental disorders and two-thirds of a large group of detainees tested by Fulton Superior Court tested positive for drugs. As one experienced jurist once told me "If we didn't have drugs we wouldn't have much business," so too without mentally ill offenders our courts would be almost empty.

So today when I saw our county's commission chairman pop into a press conference held by Atlanta's mayor and police chief to tamp down a furor over a rash or recent high profile (i.e. famous people victims) crimes I was surprised and pleased by his focus on the problem of repeat offenders.

John Eaves, the Fulton Commission chair, said he has parternered with law enforcement and the courts in Atlanta and Fulton County to set up a reentry program for felons returning to Fulton from prisons. He promised to work with city officials to deal with the problems posed by criminals.

After all, Eaves pointed out, every offender caught in Atlanta ends up in the county jail, which he said is overrun by mentally ill and addicted repeat offenders. Without addressing those underlying engines propelling these detainees to commit additional crimes the problem will only get worse, Eaves said.

I'm anxious to learn more about Eaves' effort because it is a brilliant concept, one that our chief judge has been trying to spark for several years.

One especially successful such program that Chief Judge Doris Downs points to when promoting the idea has been operating in Savannah, GA for some years. Called the Savannah Impact Center, it houses job, educational, counseling and other services for offenders coming back from prison stints along with offices for probation and other law enforcement agencies concerned with tracking and monitoring those coming back to their communities after serving their time.

The U.S. Department of Justice also recognizes prisoner reentry as a key vulnerability in our nation's criminal justice system. Here is what the DOJ's website has to say about the problem:

"Nearly 650,000 people are released from state and federal prison yearly and arrive on the doorsteps of communities nationwide. A far greater number reenter communities from local jails, and for many offenders and /defendants, this may occur multiple times in a year. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) over 50 percent of those released from incarceration will be in some form of legal trouble within 3 years. In his 2004 State of the Union, President Bush proposed “a four-year, $300 million prisoner re-entry initiative to expand job training and placement services, to provide transitional housing, and to help newly released prisoners get mentoring, including from faith-based groups."

For a better understanding of the effect of mental illness on recidivism take a look at the Public Broadcasting System's Frontline series program The Released. Its exploration of what happens to mentally ill offenders once they are released from prison found that within 18 months of being released two-thirds had been re-arrested.