I am an incarcerated felon who entered our broken criminal justice system (CJS) at age 53, after nearly 30 years as a husband, father, and a financial professional. My perspective straddles both the “inside” and “outside” worlds of American incarceration. The 97% of Americans living outside the system have no idea how fundamentally counterproductive the system operates. They don’t care. They don’t need to. I was one of them, living in the busy competitive and generally law abiding world of free enterprise America. I didn’t know anyone personally who had gone to prison. I considered prison a great mistake that a few knuckleheads volunteered to make, and now their lives were game-over.
As a taxpayer I never knew that we were flushing hundreds of billions of dollars a year on incarceration, only to make felons much worse than they were before prison, and then releasing them back into the community with little or no effective rehabilitation. What I have observed since being incarcerated, is that nearly all inmates are made significantly worse than when they arrived to prison, regardless of the category of their crime. The system also insures that after wasting huge portions of their lives behind bars, that they are released angry, destitute, and without hope.
Most criminal justice reformers are focused on only a few of the primary elements of the system, like egregiously long sentences and racial inequities. The media and the body politic react well to bold headlines exposing racially profiled arrests, unfair sentencing practices, and barbaric medical care for the incarcerated. However, there are many other “broken” components of the system (mostly hidden from the public) that remain largely ignored and are necessary for reform to succeed.
There are at least 30 broken components that I have observed, spread across the 5 stages of the criminal justice process, through which all accused criminal offenders must travel: Arrest, Jail, Court, Prison, and Community Re-Entry. Every one of these 30 broken pieces can individually sabotage the success of the entire process. Unfortunately all 5 of these individual stages are managed separately, with little overlap. Only governors and state legislatures have the power to coordinate and focus this multifaceted process toward common goals.
Those goals have not changed much over time. We all still want our communities to be kept safe, for our law-enforcement and judicial processes to remain vigilant and fair, and for the punitive process of corrections to be appropriate and restorative, just to name a few. Most within the leadership of the CJS now agree, that our “Get Tough on Crime” policies of the past few decades have failed miserably in bringing us closer to our goals. The challenge now is to correct these 30 broken pieces of the system across 5 independent domains, by refocusing all participants back to those original goals.
The U. S. has unsurprisingly become the world leader in both incarceration AND crime, so it’s pretty hard to argue that our system works. Unfortunately there are vindictive and often racist attitudes that swell within our courts, our law enforcement, and our departments of corrections. It will take strong leadership to demand compliance and performance from a conglomeration of civil servants who must learn to work together toward common goals. Many of them will need to be reminded that incarcerated offenders are still primarily fellow citizens of the United States; 10% are military veterans, most are non-violent, and most will be released from prison and live in their communities. We need for those civil servants to embrace the modem global (and “best practices”) view of criminal justice, which encompasses everything from ethical policing to fair trials to appropriate punishments to effective rehabilitation and re-entry.
I would like to clarify that I am NOT an expert in criminal justice, and I have almost NO experience with criminal law, other than my own participation over the past 8 years. That being said, I am going to highlight these 30 broken pieces of our CJS within their five chronological stages of the process, again: Arrest, Jail, Court, Prison, and Community Re-Entry.
ARREST:
Over the past few decades, America’s almost fetishistic addiction to incarceration has mushroomed. We criticize countries like China and Russia for their heavy-handed policing practices, yet statistically we are so much worse. Across all of our individual branches of law enforcement, and also within enforcement-empowered branches of government (ICE, ATF, CPS, IRS), American government is increasingly addicted to control, confinement, detainment, and incarceration. I’ve even seen USDA “officers” on the evening news, dressed in riot-gear, and brandishing assault rifles, while raiding dairy farms for the crime of producing raw milk! Somehow we have to encourage our fellow countrymen to return to the American ideal of freedom, and begin confronting this growing culture of brutal control.
“Profiling” [#1] –
I would suggest looking first at 4 basic policing strategies that are responsible for much of our current over-arresting behavior, which begins this list of 30 broken pieces of the CJS with “Profiling.” There shouldn’t be any argument that American law enforcement casts a wide net across specific racial and socioeconomic targets, I won’t waste time belaboring the obvious. There has been SOME improvement in recent years, but at the same time, the killing of unarmed black Americans by law enforcement has also increased. That alone negates any claims of improvement.
“Hunting” [#2] –
Many police departments have made a virtual sport out of arresting large numbers of citizens in predictable circumstances, like undercover marijuana stings at music concerts. I think we all appreciate the safety benefits of speed-traps and sobriety checkpoints on our roads, but most voters don’t want their tax-dollars focused on hunting down fellow citizens for victimless crimes. Especially not when the result can be prison.
“Entrapment” [#3] –
Much like “Hunting,” entrapment is responsible for a surprisingly large portion of arrests annually. Entrapment is the process whereby law enforcement initiates contact with a citizen, soliciting and/or encouraging the individual to act unlawfully. The process is technically illegal in many jurisdictions, but seldom challenged. Mostly entrapment is used to ensnare drug users, prostitution stings, and sex-offenders. The process remains controversial, and almost exclusively involves victimless crime. In most cases an actual crime is not committed, only the intent is charged (mens rea). In many European countries like Germany, mens rea criminalization is constitutionally banned.
“Escalated or Unnecessary Arrests” [#4] –
We have all heard about the suburban mom atTested for child neglect, because she allowed her 10-year-old daughter to walk the family dog around the block, unsupervised. We are also all aware of the thousands of domestic disputes that are aggressively escalated by over-zealous policing every year. Most of these arrests are unnecessary displays of power and control, and accomplish nothing constructive for the community or the CJS. Many are also highly profiled.
“Mental Health Arrests” [#5] –
Mental health arrests are arguably one of the top reasons for overcrowding in American jails, and convictions to prison. This is the result of our grand refusal as a society to care for our sick. We currently have hundreds of thousands of incarcerated citizens across America suffering from a plethora of mental illnesses, but since the Reagan era, we have refused to provide them with proper medical care. Instead we’ve chosen to trap them into our jail and prison systems. It’s cheaper. Similarly, I have witnessed an extraordinarily high number of intellectually handicapped men in my prison. Some do not fully comprehend the nature of their crimes. Many could not possibly be expected to represent themselves fairly in court. This is a situation that desperately needs closer scrutiny.
“Police Unions” [#6] –
Most Americans didn’t know much about the toxic culture of our large urban police unions until George Floyd’s murder. For those of you who were paying attention, you read about Oakland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, and New York years ago. The long history of horrific and often criminal behavior in the name of protecting qualified immunity for their officers, is a benefit whose time has past. I’m not comfortable that there was ever a time when absolute immunity from judgement or accountability was a good idea. Human beings are too imperfect to be cloaked in both power and invisibility.
JAIL:
“Inhumane Treatment” [#7] –
In all other G7 countries, jail is reserved for criminal defendants who represent a clear flight-risk, or an urgent danger to the public or themselves. In the U. S., jail has become an integrated strategic component of the prosecutorial process. Now one of the biggest dirty-little-secrets in the CJS, jail has evolved into an environment designed to weaken a defendant’s ability to effectively present and defend· themselves in court, by ·applying chronic inhumane treatment. Those who have never been incarcerated may never fully appreciate this reality, but jail is so much worse than prison. Jails are more dangerous, and physically and mentally difficult to endure.
Don’t Miss: Do Incarcerated Lives Matter?
Across the country most jails are the same, with inedible food, illegally cold temperatures, 24-hour fluorescent lighting (to induce sleep deprivation), loud and dangerously overcrowded barracks facilities (with 70 inmates per guard), and very limited hygiene. We even inflict this same treatment on children who are detained in our boarder-crossing detention-centers. This is the new American jail formula, from coast to coast. When defendants are finally presented in court, they are often traumatized, exhausted, hungry, and disheveled.
“Economic Damage” [#8] –
After a few days in jail, most people have lost their jobs. After 2 or 3 months in jail, most have likely lost their car, their home, and other property. Typical jail time for felony arrests range from a few weeks to 6 months. For those who are released from jail, the economic damage is already done. They are forced to re-start the process of the poverty march; crawling uphill to a job, a car, an apartment etc. all over again. This hurts offenders, employers, and the community terribly. If this occurs as the result of an unnecessary arrest, that arrest becomes criminal.
“Economic Exploitation – Jail” [#9] –
To say jails and prisons have a captive market to sell products and services to, is comically cruel. Make no mistake, they ARE in the business of selling products and services to inmates, at egregiously inflated prices. And they are imposing this price gouging on what is already one of the poorest socioeconomic segments of our nation, who are now enduring an elevated economic crisis BECAUSE of their arrest. A 15 minute phone call can cost $20 in many states. A .10 cent packet of Raman Noodles often costs $1.25 or more in jails. Jails and prisons sell inmates everything from coffee to books to televisions, at prices that are 100% to 1,000% over “Wal-Mart prices.” And yes, all jails and prisons receive commissions or contractual kickbacks on all this revenue. This really is a shameful exploitation of our most troubled citizens, at the worst time in their lives.
“Limited Bond/Bail” [#10] –
In American jails, only the well-off make bail. In Wisconsin the situation is most dire, with no option of producing a discounted bond instead of cash. Most defendants are stuck in jail for the duration of their entire contest, which is exactly where the prosecution wants them. Repeatedly the deck is stacked against the poor, making or keeping them poorer. More important in the short term, is the defendant’s ability to work, and organize their defense, and to care for their family during a horrific time. Holding them in a compromised position for months, only to game a prosecutorial advantage is simply not just. Also, some counties are notorious for arguably fraudulent bail-revocation practices that desperately need investigating.
“Inadequate Medical/Mental Healthcare” [#11] –
(Applies to both jails and prisons) Although you never hear about it in the mainstream media, in publications like “Prison Legal News” there are monthly lists of lawsuits against jails and prisons for inadequate medical care, negligent care, criminal negligence, criminal indifference, and wrongful deaths…all resulting from substandard (and sometimes barbaric) medical care provided to inmates. There is no polite way of putting this; if you lock someone up in a box for many years, you MUST insure their wellbeing. The State must bear 100% of the responsibility and liability for the safety and health of their charges. Just because a citizen is serving a sentence for the commission of a crime, the .State is not then empowered to cause physical hann or death to that individual. The full cost of proper healthcare is a large part of the true cost of incarceration. Those multimillion-dollar lawsuits have now become a large part of that cost, which taxpayers need to discover.
COURT:
“Inadequate Counsel” [#12] –
The line “if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you” is the biggest lie told in America. Most American’s are not na”ive, they know that rich people get good lawyers (and more often don’t go to prison), and poor people get lesser representation (and more often DO go to prison). No one ever expected John DeLorean or Michael Jackson to go to prison.
I will temper my criticism of public defenders as a whole, because so many are greatly overworked civil servants. However, what I observed in my own county jail was a 90% dereliction of duty. Most of the public defenders never spoke to their “clients” until moments before presenting them to a judge. They were completely unavailable by phone, and sometimes they simply didn’t show up in court. The lack of effort and professionalism was staggering. Sometimes even their knowledge of the law, or the workings of the system, or the details of their own client’s cases was unforgivable. I watched dozens of poor and often mentally troubled men railroaded to prison by the indifference of their public defenders. If the State was forced to defend the statistical outcomes regarding how many citizens represented by public defenders are actually released, or go to trial, vs. those represented by private attorneys, there would be constitutional outrage.
This can never be reconciled as long as the public defender’s paychecks come from the same office as the prosecutor’s paycheck. This fundamental conflict of interests would not be tolerated in ANY other segment of American society. The state will eventually be forced to provide outside counsel to represent defendants, paying the market-rate for legal fees. The federal government has long since chosen to hire outside “contractors” in most professions, where the specialization and education required is outside the scope of civil service. Consider computer technology, and military technology, where we spend billions of dollars on private contractors annually. Yes, this will make prosecution more expensive, but that will be closer to the true and fair cost of prosecution.
“Plea Bullying” [#13] –
I choose the term “plea-bullying” because that is what the American prosecution process has devolved into. For decades now we have allowed the process to run wildly unchecked, beginning with most states’ attorneys general. Prosecutors have been encouraged to behave like commissioned salespeople, pursuing the most numerous and inflated charges possible, regardless of the truth. Then with absolute impunity they bully, threaten, and even lie, in order to coerce a guilty plea from a defendant, avoiding a trial AND convincing the defendant they will get some kind of reduced sentence. In truth what the defendant usually gets is a railroaded case, a hefty sentence, and absolutely NO chance of an appeal, because they agreed to a plea.
Prosecutors and judges conspire in this apparent negotiation, in the name of economy. “If you make me go to trial, I’m going to lock you up for life!” This has to stop. Do we need new legislation to enforce a defendant’s constitutional right to defend themselves? Do people not see the glaringly obvious connection between our 400% increase in incarceration and our simultaneous disuse of fair trials? Now only 3% of Wisconsin’s (and many other states’) criminal court cases ever actually go to trial. I think that if we are deciding whether or not to put someone in prison for 5, 10, or 20 years, their cases deserve to be heard by our court system as it was originally designed. That is closer to the true and fair cost of prosecution.
“Truth In Sentencing” [#14] –
Although Truth in Sentencing (TIS) will require the state legislature to repeal, the courts must immediately reconsider the sentence structures they continue handing down, while we remain shackled to this draconian castigation. TIS was a “Get Tough on Crime” rhetoric-driven concept, that more-or-less guaranteed convicts would serve ALL of their time sentenced. 25 years ago offenders were being handed down extremely long sentences, but serving only ½ to ½ of their time, depending on behavior. The spirit of the TIS campaign was to apply more fair and reasonable sentences on offenders, but insure they served ALL of that “reasonable” time.
What happened next however, was that the “Lock-Em-Up-For-Life” campaign began spreading throughout the courtrooms and the voting booths, and offenders were given the same long life-ruining sentences, now with NO chance of early release or incentive to rehabilitate. Most experts agree that TIS is responsible for much of the 400% growth in our prison population since it was enacted.
“Sentencing Guidelines” [#15] –
This is a catch-all phrase suggesting that judges work from a simple table, listing crimes by severity on one axis, and sentencing time on the other. And at a base level it IS that simple. However our judges don’t apply those guidelines fairly and blindly. Those guidelines also include recommended practices that have evolved ·over time, like running sentences on related charges (for a single event) concurrently, instead of consecutively (often ignored). Additionally, the consideration of “risk factors,” that determine an offender’s propensity to re-offend, like age, first-offense, history or responsibility within the community. Again, these are often ignored.
I hesitate to elaborate on the breadth of Sentencing Guidelines as a systemic problem, because it is (respectfully) a serious science that is constantly being tweaked and refined, in a genuine pursuit of fairness. However, every day we read stories about inner-city kids getting decades of prison-time for victimless drug-crimes, while the rich and connected get none. Certainly we can do better than this? Certainly we should expect more accountability from our judges?
“Pre-Sentence Investigators.” [#16] –
Another courtroom process that needs complete reform, is the use of pre-sentence investigators (PSis). A PSI is a hybrid position, where a parole officer (PO) who is a full time employee of the Department of Community Corrections (DCC), also works for the courts, reporting directly to judges on a case-by-case basis. The original intention for the creation of this position, was to relieve some of the backlogged sentencing burden on judges. PSI’s are expected to read all relevant case information, in addition to interviewing the offender and any other relevant parties. They then render their own sentencing recommendation. The ideal is that the judge will consider all 3 recommendations in a case; one from the prosecutor, one from the defendant’s attorney, and one from the PSI. The judge’s job is then reduced to simply weighing the judgments of these 3 sources, ALL of which are completely biased by design.
The two primary problems with this system are that first, the PSis are in no way qualified to be making these judgments and recommendations. They are professional Parole Officers with MAYBE 2-years of criminology education, and NO meaningful education or training in law, psychology, or counseling. They are expected to make potentially life ruining judgments based on behavioral risk factors, and other elements of the complex science behind sentencing guideline policy, without qualification.
Secondly, these PSis (remember, POs) have transmuted over the past decades into an exclusively hostile and anti-offender breed of law-enforcement agent. The most common complaint is that the PSis bully the “relevant parties” being interviewed for negative information, exclusively. Any mitigating factors are withheld from the court. Remember, these are the same individuals who are incentivized to revoke offenders back to prison. They are incentivized to police and hunt and bully released offenders for any potentially revocable rule violation. It is their full-time job (now) to return offenders to prison, however possible. I think it’s fair to say, that the current mindset of the PSI is too biased and hostile, to be considered as a fair judgment within the court’s sentencing quorum. What we need are more judges actually doing their jobs as judges, and not outsourcing such an important component to a position that stacks the deck so aggressively against the offender.
“The Decision to Incarcerate.” [#17] –
Lastly, with regard to reform at the court level, we need to recalibrate our judges’ weights and measures regarding the decision to incarcerate. Like teaching our nation’s policing forces to rethink confrontation, learning to de-escalate potentially dangerous situations, we need to identify the root of the ubiquitous “Lock-Em-Up-For-Life” attitude throughout the CJS, all the way up to our judges.
Is it right or appropriate that we send someone to prison for having a common mental disorder, or a substance abuse disorder, or for thinking about committing a crime, or for having a passive connection to someone who committed a crime? We are sending a lot of people to prison who need medical/mental help. Prison will not fix those people; it will literally destroy them. Yet increasingly we sentence non-violent broken citizens to prison with only disingenuous lip service paid to a promise of future therapy.
The bottom line is that sentencing is 100% squarely on the shoulders of our judges, making this potentially the easiest piece of the broken system to fix. Every one of our over-policed, over-charged, and over-sentenced offenders, was sent into our overcrowded prisons by one judge. The buck stops right-there. Obviously most of our judges continue to ignore the recent cries for reform. They make the decision to incarcerate many more times each day than is right or necessary. The decision to incarcerate should be the LAST tool in the drawer to be deployed by the CJS, not a goal to be achieved in every case, by all the various members of the team. It may require reform in the state legislature to reform sentencing guidelines, because for now it appears that our judges are not listening. This is also a foundation for the campaign against electing judges, instead of selecting judges based on merit.
PRISON:
“Long Term Dehumanization” [#18]-
By the time an offender finally gets to prison, it’s a relief. I suspect this is by design. Prison is much safer than jail, and finally the physical cruelties of jail are over. The food is edible. You get to wear real shoes. You can see and smell the outdoors, and even sleep with the lights off. Yet somehow while you are feeling ironically grateful to be in prison, the process of “long term dehumanization” begins.
Most of our G7 friends have learned that dehumanizing treatment in prison is counterproductive to rehabilitation. Treating grown men with hostility and contempt, 24/7, year after year, undennines most program efforts to refo1m and prepare an individual for re-entry into the community. But contempt remains policy in most of our prisons; both guards and non-security staff are instructed to treat inmates with constant contempt. Those staffers who don’t comply are reprimanded, ostracized, or fired.
The hostile contempt, the isolation from society, and the constant punitive treatment regarding every imaginable aspect of daily life, eventually conspire to destroy a person’s civility and self-esteem. And why? To what end? What do you get when you abuse a human being every day for 10 years? You get a person who is still getting out of prison one day, and moving into YOUR community! Only now they are much worse than when they came in. Being “firm” is one thing. Being hostile and abusive doesn’t help anyone.
“Education/Vocational Training” [#19] –
“Substance Abuse/Criminal Behavior Rehabilitation” [#20] –
All of that dehumanizing behavior also creates a lethal chemistry that destroys the effectiveness of the prison programs, which offenders desperately need. The educational, vocational, and rehabilitation programs are critical to offenders. These are really the only opportunities that the Department of Corrections (DOC) has to accomplish something constructive, something that can make a difference in an offender’s recidivism risk. Yet our prioritization and approach to this opportunity is disingenuous.
Incoming inmates at this prison test at 3rd grade reading levels (mean avg.). With 2,000 inmates that means more than 500 of them are functionally illiterate. But there are only 300 inmates enrolled in the prison’s HSED/GED educational program, and presently that program has been cut exactly by half, because of staffing mismanagement. Additionally, out of 2,000 inmates only 100 are enrolled in our 3 vocational programs: Horticulture, Construction, and Culinary Arts. This is a tragically underutilized opportunity.
Our recovery and rehabilitation programs encompass different problems, including the fact that they are 30 years out of date. There have been profound advancements in the sciences behind recovery and rehabilitation therapies over the past 30 years. Most of the first world has long since embraced the many evidence-based reconciliation therapies, which focus on addressing the underlying issues that cause/encourage substance abuse and criminal behaviors. Trauma, and all of its consequences like depression, abuse, loss, isolation, CAN be diagnosed and treated effectively.
The disciplines of neuroscience, developmental psychopathology, and interpersonal neurobiology have all helped birth or advance effective therapies like Traumatic Memory Integration, Limbic System Therapy, EMDR, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and a list of other cognitive behavior therapies. There is even a Harm Reduction Therapy, designed specifically to treat trauma that is caused by prison-administered therapy programs. Our current prison programs are antiquated forms of cognitive behavioral therapy that simply do not work. We know it, they know it, and outside professionals know it.
We are also paying top dollar to outside contractors to facilitate these outdated programs. Many of these contractors are a fundamental part of the problem. Like other prison contractors who provide products and services to inmates, there is rampant cronyism and corruption among program contractors, who often provide abbreviated services with low quality staff, while paying recompense back to the prisons. They provide no accountability or long-term follow-up, and many of their program syllabuses are not even recognized as effective by outside therapeutic community professionals.
Also, most prison rehabilitation programs are administered sparingly and begrudgingly. For instance, an offender with a 10 year sentence, and an 18 month recommended program to complete, will not be offered that program until just over 18 months before his scheduled mandatory release date. This delay in program facilitation keeps the offender ineligible for transfer to a minimum-security facility, and ineligible for the early release programs provided by the state’s legislature. It also increases the chances that an offender will not complete their program before leaving prison, which begins a cascade of more restrictive post-release treatment and re-entry rules, dramatically increasing the offenders’ chances of being revoked back to prison.
Additionally, warehousing offenders for a decade, without attempting to address the individual’s problems or criminality, only proliferates what psychologists call “differential association;” the increased criminality that occurs through prolonged exposure to a criminal environment. In other words, the psychologists who administer our prison’s programs are knowingly harming inmates, according to their own universally accepted conclusions on criminal behavior, by delaying treatment.
We need to drop the cronyism and seek out the “best practices” providers, like most European prisons did 30 years ago. But equally important we need to administer our programs immediately and without hostility, contempt, or distrust. Rehabilitation and re entry will eventually become a primary focus of our penal system, as they already are elsewhere in the G7.
“Economic Exploitation – Prison” [#21] –
Unfortunately, economic exploitation plays a broader role in prisons than in jails. Once in prison, inmates are allowed to buy a multitude of consumer·products, from approved catalogue providers, none of whom are actually respected retailers. Most however, DO donate to local political campaigns.
Economic exploitation in prison includes several conjunctive parts; there are the shamelessly inflated products and services available to purchase, juxtaposed to the slave-. wages paid to inmates for working prison jobs (.17 cents per hour on average). Those wages must also be considered against the arbitrary withholdings that prisons impose. In Wisconsin most inmates are being charged 55% in withholdings, leaving only 45% of whatever they earn, or what someone might send as a gift. Additionally, the prison contracts with an outside cash-transfer service that collects an additional 5% fee from all funds a loved one may send in via money order or electronic transfer. The prison, of course, keeps a commission on those fees, just as they do on all other purchases of products, services, and phone calls.
Obviously within this scheme, the prison’s intention is to exploit (or punish) the families of inmates, not so much the inmates themselves. The products and services sold could never be afforded by inmates on their prison pay. None of the contracted providers would be willing to do business with the prisons, if all they could possibly earn came only from those paltry inmate incomes.
Again, the CJS is simply ripping off America’s poorest and most compromised citizens, who don’t have the money to fight for their own voices. If this kind of exploitation was happening to any other socioeconomic group in America, the courts would have long since stopped the entire scheme. This is a shameful pillaging of inmates and their families that must stop.
“Credit Vandalism” [#22] –
As an offender passes through jail, court, and then prison, there are many bills (or accounts receivable) levied against them; everything from court costs to DNA-sur charges to a litany of other fees. The DOC and county jails become the enforcers of these debts, and often threatens punitive credit-action toward the collection of them. An incarcerated offender literally cannot pay these bills, they have no access to outside assets, and are not permitted to execute financial transactions. Taking credit action against an incarcerated person does nothing but further damage their personal credit history. It’s analogous to beating someone while they are handcuffed.
COMMUNITY RE-ENTRY:
The last 8 of the 30 broken pieces of the CJS fall into the Community Re-Entry segment. The re-entry process grows increasingly important, because our factory prisons have mass-produced a bottleneck of damaged citizens over the past few decades, without the resources to accommodate their re-entry. The moment an offender leaves prison, they begin a high-stress scavenger-hunt in which they must establish or acquire everything from housing, to clothing, to ID, to bank accounts, to a job. Sometimes the system helps with some of those requirements. Sometimes the system offers no help at all.
“Crimeless Revocation” [#23] –
Instead of deploying more resources to support the community re-entry process, the DCC has been focusing the majority of its resources on hunting down released offenders and returning them to prison for minor rule violations. 40% of all offenders entering prison in Wisconsin are RE-entering prison because of a crimeless revocation, levied against them by their PO. In 2022 that percentage hit 60% of all new prisoners.
Crimeless revocation has been allowed to run wild, with zero accountability. The vast majority of these revocations are for petty rule violations, for which we are sending people back to prison for YEARS without due process. In some jurisdictions, there is no legal representation allowed. A felon is placed before an administrative law judge, in a closed hearing with no stenographers or defendant witnesses. These administrative judges rubber-stamp whatever the recommendations are from the PO.
The Wisconsin State Legislature now acknowledges that crimeless revocation is a problem. However, eradicating the process will once again require strong leadership and management, over a small army of civil servants, who don’t necessarily agree with the facts in front of them. There have been calls to reign in crimeless revocation in the past, which have been utterly ignored by the DCC and the courts. We will need to try something new in order to encourage cooperation and compliance from our civil servants.
“Supervision Rules” [#24] –
An appropriate segue here would be to examine the purpose and effectiveness of supervision rules. These long lists of rules for offenders to follow after their release, (which the vast majority of offenders have been unable to follow, and ultimately become the cause of their crimeless revocations), need to be re-examined. Supervision rules have devolved into a hostile framework of control over offenders, and are no longer a constructive set of boundaries relevant to their specific offenses. We impose 10:00 PM curfews on grown men who perform shift work. We don’t allow them to change jobs, addresses, phones, or even buy a car, without the express permission of their PO, under the threat of being sent back to prison. Many can’t date, shop, or see a doctor without permission.
We all agree that drunk drivers should have rules governing the use of alcohol, and child abusers should be prohibited from school playgrounds. But we’ve gone so far off the rails that re-entry rules prohibit offenders from re-entry success. Simply put, it appears that POs have intentionally used supervision rules to set up offenders for failure, not for successful re-entry. This doesn’t help the community at all.
“Release into Homelessness” [#25] –
Another action of the DOC/DCC that appears to be a set-up for failure, is the continuing release of offenders into homelessness. We cannot continue to lock people up for many years, and then abruptly dump them into a community, jobless, homeless, and destitute. In many states, the number of homeless-released offenders is heavily biased towards sex offenders (SO’s). Since everyone in the system knows that SOs are not permitted into homeless shelters, you have to suspect that this action is intentional, creating a scenario where offenders are more likely to inadve1iently commit a rule violation, and end up back in prison. We also send many non-SOs into DOC managed halfway houses, but only for a few months. Then they are kicked out, homeless. It is impossible to navigate the requirements of re-entry while homeless, and the DCC knows that. We must provide enough emergency housing facilities to accommodate the number of prisoners we release. Just like adequate medical care, the state owns this responsibility from the moment they send a citizen to prison.
“Limitations on Housing and Work Opportunities” [#26] –
There are sometimes seemingly arbitrary limitations placed on re-entering offenders, prohibiting where they can live and work. I am not talking about an alcoholic living over a bar. Often the limitations are based on arbitrary lines drawn by communities to prohibit “felons,” “ex-cons,” “criminals,” from living within a certain boundary. These are community prohibitions that have no merit with regard to community safety, and are blatantly unconstitutional.
Ironically, many released offenders that have such a low probability to actually re-offend (categorically), that they represent a lower risk to the community than its current residents do (statistically), to commit a first-time offense. Is it right or constructive to discriminate against an individual with no real justification? It is hard enough for the “ex-con” to find a job, and a home, and slowly begin to re-build a life within a community. Making re-entry even MORE difficult for no other reason than pure malice, is not good for the commw1ity.
“After Care Programs” [#27] –
After care programs are tragically deficient in our current system. They are often not up to modern best-practices standards, and there are not enough of them. Many are run by the same private contractors who also manage the in-prison programs, which should be your first red flag.
Many of the available programs, like the in-prison equivalents, are hostile towards the offenders, and actually make regular controlling threats toward them, promising to return them to prison. Anyone who knows anything about recovery and rehabilitation counseling (outside of the DOC) knows that this is ludicrous. Modern rehab and recovery programs are based on trust and truth, not fear and intimidation. The fact that your P.O. (who has no meaningful training in psychology or counseling) receives your private program files, and is privy to every word you say in counseling, should tell you that the entire structure of after care needs to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. I have met several men who were revoked back to prison, either for things they said in group therapy, or for refusing to pay additional fees for additional non-cowi-directed counseling, to private program contractors.
“Financial Burdens” [#28] –
And who pays for all these after care programs? In recent years the offenders do. All of the financial burdens of re-entry are increasingly being shifted to the offender. From the cost ofrequired after-care programs, to supervision fees (the PO’s salary), to the ankle bracelet monitoring fees, to the cost of administering lie-detector tests, ALL are born by the offender. All but the supervision fees are paid to private contractors, and all provide a commission paid back to the DCC.
I have seen the paperwork on departing inmates here at Oshkosh Correctional who are being released. The most recent statement I saw totaled $380 per month, for the above mentioned “services.” Here in the Fox Valley that’s the equivalent of a mortgage payment. How can you release someone from prison, absolutely destitute and looking down the barrel of minimum wage, AND charge them $380 per month, and say you are helping them to re-enter the community? Those burdens are requirements of the STATE, they are the STATE’S burdens. The moment an arrest is made, the state must be prepared to shoulder the financial responsibilities of incarceration, legal defense, medical care, and all rehabilitative and re-entry programs and processes.
“Fear Mongering” [#29] –
I mention this next broken piece of the system with some trepidation, mainly because we have no direct control over it. Fear mongering is an insidious force that often makes up people’s minds for them, without any facts or truth. The most obvious tangible source of fear mongering that I have witnessed, is the age-old partnership between law enforcement and the media.
It seems like only yesterday that that powerful partnership came up with the “Stranger Danger” campaign, based on absolutely nothing. Just an imaginary “monster-under-the bed” fear of what could happen. The truth eventually came out, that 99% of all child abductions are committed by someone the victim’s family knows WELL. But if you ask the average citizen today, they don’t know that. The damage is done, and it appears to be permanent.
Now after making an entire generation of children paranoid, this compelling partnership is at it again, polluting and corrupting arrest and recidivism data, by blending it with crimeless revocation data. They are preaching false statistics on the evening news that grossly inflate recidivism rates, and propensity to re-offend statistics. I’ve seen it on my own local news media, with figures claiming 50% and 80% recidivism rates, in offender segments with REAL recidivism rates in the low single digits. This is harmful on an Orwellian scale. Most citizens naturally believe what they are told by law enforcement, through their local media.
That false information and manufactured fear mongering keeps the public wary of helping our cause. It keeps them from renting us apartments, and employing us, and voting for leaders who will work to modernize and reform our broken system. We need our leaders to reach out to law enforcement and to the media, and demand that they tell the truth.
“Inequality” [#30] –
Now finally, last but not least, although possibly the most vague of all the 29 broken pieces of the CJS, is inequality. We are manufacturing a class of American citizens without any civil rights protection. Consider the challenge: offenders are expected to re acclimate to society while successfully supporting themselves and rebuilding their lives. This must be accomplished while flat broke, working a job on the lowest rung of the employment ladder, and paying huge state-fees to their jailers. This also must be accomplished in the shadow of an overbearing DCC and law enforcement (they are betting on you to fail!). The journey must also be navigated under the prying spotlight of suspicious neighbors, landlords, employers, program facilitators, and even sometimes loved ones.
In addition to all that pressure, our increasingly smug society views offenders as 3rd class citizens at best… not citizens at all in the eyes of law enforcement. You cannot vote or own a firearm or travel freely within your own country (or even outside of your own COUNTY). You can’t buy a car, change jobs, or make a doctor’s appointment, without the express permission of your PO. You are not even human in the eyes of your PO, and most re-entering offenders look down at the flashing red light on their GPS-monitored ankle-bracelet, and pretty much agree.
At some point all of the interested parties across the entire Criminal Justice System need to begin thinking and acting like stakeholders in their mission. They need to act with constructive direction, and not mindless contempt. They need to accept that an offender is being released, and treat them accordingly. To treat every offender as though they can’t be trusted to do anything at all, is counter productive to re-entry. Why release them at all if they are as dangerous as this behavior portends? Every aspect of our current re-entry release process is part of a stacked deck, designed to force an offender to fail. None of this helps the offender or the community.
Currently, law enforcement, prosecution, confinement, the administrative courts, and re entry, all work together to elevate further incarceration. This is like a medical system that encourages all of its managers to keep their patients sick. The priority is no longer to manage criminal justice. Its apparent priority now is to manufacture more prisoners, in order to perpetuate job-growth and security within the system.
The bottom line is we lock up too many people for too much time, and cause too much mental and socioeconomic damage. We all must be able to see that the long-term costs of our current treatment of offenders, outweighs the cost of reform and true rehabilitation, especially when you consider all the productivity that is erased while they are locked up, and as their lives and careers are permanently diminished.
I hope that these observations will reach a few of our elected leaders, and resonate with them. I hope that they will analyze the microeconomics of the hundreds of billions of dollars currently being wasted every year on incarceration, in addition to the hundreds of billions in lost productivity, only to make our citizens worse than when we arrested them.
It will require a grass-roots fact-based campaign that finds traction in our state legislatures and governor’s mansions, demanding changes in policy and action. Demanding that each state creates a panel of 5 members responsible for each of the 5 branches of criminal justice, answering to their governor. And for once, our civil servants will need to take a cue from the private sector, and terminate those employees who refuse to perform their duties in supporting new policy. If we can deploy a blueprint for reform in the precursor states like Connecticut, NY, California, Minnesota, and Illinois, Federal buy-in will eventually follow.
Derek B. Rose 643096
Oshkosh Correctional Institution
P.O. Box 189
Phoenix, MD 21131
