By Mike Cason
An initiative to help people released from prison in Alabama has set a goal of cutting the state’s recidivism rate by half by 2030.
The Alabama Commission on Reentry, also called Reentry Alabama, met Tuesday and stressed the need for collaboration and communication to assist former inmates in finding jobs, housing, and help with problems such as addictions and mental illness, services that can help them sustain productive lives after incarceration.
“This is a very complicated subject,” Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles Director Cam Ward said. “And it’s not one agency or one entity that’s going to fix it.”
Ward, a criminal justice reform advocate in Alabama for more than a decade, chairs Reentry Alabama. The commission includes state lawmakers and representatives from the Alabama departments of Corrections, Labor, Law Enforcement, Mental Health, Human Resources, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Alabama Community College System, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other organizations.
Alabama is one of five states that have joined a program called Reentry 2030 in collaboration with the Council of State Governments Justice Center. Reentry 2030 Program Director Jesse Kelley and Senior Policy Advisor Nicole Jarrett spoke at Tuesday’s Reentry Alabama meeting at the State House.
Alabama’s most recently available numbers, from 2018, show a recidivism rate of 29%, according to the CSG Justice Center. That’s the percentage of people who were reincarcerated within three years of release. The rate improved from a decade earlier. It was 34% rate in 2008.
Alabama’s rate appears pretty close to the middle of the pack among states. The CSG Justice Center report says states differ in how they calculate recidivism and cautioned against comparing state rates. A table in the CSG report showed that 16 states had rates lower than the 29% that Alabama reported.
Nationally, recidivism rates for state inmates declined from 35% in 2008 to 27% in 2019, the CSG reported. The report notes that Congress passed the Second Chance Act in 2008, which has provided $1.2 billion to state and local efforts to reduce recidivism.
Alabama officials have stressed the need to reduce recidivism for years. In 2020, Gov. Kay Ivey’s study group on criminal justice policy released a report saying that lowering recidivism was the long-term solution to Alabama’s perennial problem of overcrowded and understaffed prisons.
In December 2020, the Department of Justice alleged in a lawsuit that violent conditions in Alabama’s men’s prisons violate the Constitution. The case is ongoing.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Reentry Alabama members talked about efforts to help people leaving the prison system reintegrate into society.
Ward said Pardons and Paroles has helped people at the PREP Center in Perry County, which offers education and job training, as well as mental health and addiction treatment. Pardons and Paroles offers similar programs at its day reporting centers across the state for people on probation or parole.
J.F. Ingram State Technical College offers vocational training for state inmates.
Several initiatives are intended to help inmates leaving prison obtain the identification documents they will need to find work and reestablish their lives after prison.
The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency is working on a project to provide them with driver’s licenses or non-driver state identification cards. The Alabama Department of Corrections is in the final stages of completing a partnership with the Department of Public Health to provide birth certificates for inmates leaving incarceration, said Jeffery Williams, deputy commissioner for governmental relations for ADOC. Williams said ADOC has provided Social Security cards to close to 100% of inmates leaving incarceration.
Alabama Secretary of Labor Fitzgerald Washington said the Department of Labor established a career center at Julia Tutwiler Prison last year. Washington said the career center begins helping inmates with job preparation six months before they are to be released. Washington said the Labor Department plans to establish career centers at other prisons.
Ward said state agencies need a shared database that helps them identify the needs for people being released from prison. He said that information, such as whether a person has a history of drug addiction or has been diagnosed with a mental illness, is hard to find now because there is no central database.
“The problem is, my system has an identifier for probation and parolees,” Ward said. “Court has an identifier for those going through the court system. DOC (the Department of Corrections) has an AIS (inmate) number. Nobody has the same number.”
The Bureau of Pardons and Paroles is preparing to release a request for proposals (RFP) to companies to build a central database that agencies could access. Ward said that would help agencies collaborate on how to help inmates find the services they need.
“Mental Health could come in and look at my stuff that’s allowed under law,” Ward said. “I can look at their stuff that’s allowed under law. And you wouldn’t have to go to eight or nine different sites.”
“You may not need mental health services,” Ward said. “You may have a drug addiction. You may not have either one. But if we had a unique identifier we could evaluate you and say this is what this person needs. Maybe he’s only got a third-grade reading level. We’ve got to work on that. So it allows us to figure out how we can best use and allocate the resources we have without just throwing everything against the wall.”
Reentry Alabama was reauthorized by legislation that passed earlier this year. Ward said the goal will be to meet monthly to get ready for the next legislative session, which starts in February.
“Everyone will have a role in this,” Ward said. “I think it’s going to take all of us using best practices in our individual fields, our individual agencies, our individual groups to make it work. I do think it’s ambitious. But I think with the united support, the bipartisan support we’ve had over the years on this, I think we can really make a dent in a better, safer society for those who are post-incarceration.
“Ninety-five percent of everyone in prison eventually comes out. You’ve got to figure out what you want to do. I know what I want. I want a safe society. I think we all do. But that doesn’t come cheap. That comes with better resources and efforts to making sure they’ve got a job. They’re able to fix their underlying issue. Stable housing. Stable income. And I think we can do this. I think it’s a goal that we all share in common.”
