It’s the Recidivism Rate, Stupid!

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When a man (or a woman) is paroled from a California state prison, he gets $200 “gate money,” and close to nothing else in the way of help as he attempts to restart his life. Employers don’t want to hire him. Landlords don’t want to rent to him. And, in many cases, he has no identification. If he had a California driver’s license, it has likely expired.

One needs ID to apply for most jobs (or to rent an apartment). . Thus, the lack of it simply sets up yet another in an already daunting series of barriers that stand between a parolee and a stable, legal, tax-paying life.

Faced with the reality of a bad budget year combined with a state prison system so huge, so overcrowded, so dysfunctional that it is (still) at risk of a federal take over, plus the appalling fact of California’s seventy percent recidivism rate, a bunch of state legislators came up with an idea. Since the state couldn’t seem to afford much in the way of truely rehabilitative programs while the inmate is in prison, nor did it offer a functional re-entry program to aid prisoners in making the transition when they got out, there was at least one cheap but meaningful bit of help they could offer a prisoner upon his or her parole: the state could issue every parolee a California IDs.

Even better, the price tag for the program was only $55,000 a year. Since incarcerating someone for a 12 months costs slightly over $35,000, if the program kept a mere two guys from returning to prison, it would easily pay for itself with fifteen grand left over.

What a sensible idea, right?

Apparently not.

Although the bill, AB 2099 (which only proposes to try out the program in three prisons) has passed the state Assembly, there is the fear that it will get hung up in the Senate because…..Republicans oppose it.

Why?

In the Sacramento Bee , which reported on the issue on Sunday, lawmaker Joel Anderson explains the matter thusly:

“I don’t think that parolees should be able to jump the DMV line and get special treatment at the cost of taxpayers,” said Assemblyman Joel Anderson, R-Alpine. “It’s $55,000 that we shouldn’t be spending to give special privileges to parolees. … I wouldn’t give them two cents.”

Uh, Joel, honey? You know that crazy old thing your momma used to say about “cutting off your nose to spite your face?” If you look it up, you’ll find your photo right there next to the definition.

This is Stuck On Stupid at its most pernicious.

Here’s more from the Bee article:

The most critical time of a parolee’s experience are the first hours and days of his parole,” Russell said. “Meanwhile, the guy’s got no job and no ability to identify who he is.”

Russell pointed out successful programs in other states, such as Project Rio in Texas, that provide parolees with identification.

Robert Robinson, senior case manager with the United African American Ministerial Action Council, based in San Diego, said valid ID could only help a parolee’s chance of staying out of jail.

A similar bill, proposed last year by Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, who also authored this bill, was vetoed by Arnold Schwarzenegger who, in his whiplash of a veto message said that he understood that the ID was important for prisoners upon their release, but that he was concerned that it “will result in parolees receiving services that are not currently available to the general public.”

(Sounds like code for: “I get it and I’ll sign the damned bill if you find a way to get these fools from my own party off my back.”)

I am sick beyond words of having tax-payer money—money that could be used for schools and roads and libraries—instead poured into the ever-widening maw of the largest state correctional system in the nation just because half of the state legislature is scared of being labeled soft on crime, while the other half equates vengeance with justice.

You should be sick of it too.