Corrections costs are eating taxpayers alive, here in Colorado and across the nation. The reason is recidivism, a hard-to-pronounce, $100 word that means criminals are being recycled over and over again through the justice system. However, there may be an answer to this gargantuan problem - and it's right under our noses.
First, the big, ugly picture: According to the Justice Department, we as a nation just set a new and infamous record of 2 million citizen-criminals behind bars. An unhappy statistic, indeed, but one that disguises the full enormity of the problem of crime in America. In fact, we spend more than $145 billion annually on housing, feeding, supervising, judging and tracking 6.6 million lawbreakers, including parolees, people on bail or awaiting trial and those wearing electronic restraints. The weight of this financial burden, added to the accompanying shredding of our normally peaceful social fabric, stands solidly as prima-facie evidence of a massive societal problem.
Colorado's share of the direct costs (enforcement, judiciary and corrections) of dealing with society's criminal element is more than $1 billion annually. In some recent years, the tab has been as high as $2 billion because of the need for new prisons and jails. Colorado's two newest prisons, in Sterling and Trinidad, are also slated to become our largest. And one of the newest jails, Larimer County Detention Center, is targeted to be the largest in the state.
The Department of Corrections' appropriation alone has grown to $438 million for fiscal year 2002-03, in keeping with a Colorado inmate population growing at an average annual rate of 7.9 percent. Using these numbers, we can extrapolate an ongoing state corrections budget approaching some $1 billion annually by 2013. In addition, the projected need for another 10,000-plus high-security beds by 2013 would require another $1.2 billion for prison construction and expansion ($115,000 per bed) over the same 10-year period, adding another $120 million annually to state capital expenditures.
Incredibly, those figures are dramatically understated because they do not include much of the cost for incarcerating and supervising juveniles - primarily those administrative funds buried within the environs of the total $2 billion Department of Human Services appropriation. Nor do the figures include county-jail expenditures.
Worse yet, in a year when discretionary spending for education, health and welfare is being cut to the quick, the legislature is being asked to pony up $90 million for yet another prison. Why this continuing need for prisons? Has our corrections system become nothing more than a "Soylent Green" nightmare, warehousing and recycling a large criminal element for which there is no hope? The most fundamental cause of jail and prison growth can be traced back to that $100 word: recidivism.
We keep sending the same men, women and children back to prison, over and over again. (Yes, children. We have 10 prison-like detention facilities for kids as young as 10, and they have their own sad recidivism rates.) On top of that, we add another 8 percent or so to our inmate populations annually through a steady inflow of first-time offenders. To envision the situation most graphically, simply imagine the potential cost of a hypothetical, fast-growing state university system from which no one ever graduates.
The state's sheriffs, police chiefs and other authorities generally agree that our penal system of reformation and rehabilitation is broken. And little is being done to repair the damage, according to penal experts such as Vincent Schiraldi, president of the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute: "Up to the 1980s, prisons were at least attempting to turn these guys' lives around. They've stopped attempting to do that, and we are suffering for it now."
We're further told by these same authorities that the "real" recidivism rate might be as high as 85 percent, in contrast to the official 67 percent, because formal studies are based primarily on surveys of people who are on parole (i.e., times of best behavior).
The statistics also are driven up by the increasing rate of female and juvenile incarceration over the past 10 years - a rise that outpaces the increase in adult male incarceration by several hundred percentage points. The ramifications of this phenomenon are enormous, holding out assurances that future generations will keep the penal industry well supplied with clients. Historically, about half the kids with a dad in jail will turn to crime. A majority of kids with both mom and dad in jail will turn to crime as a normal way of life.
But there is hope for resolving much of this fast-growing problem. In saying this, I am not being glib, since I speak for a group that brings 23 years of collective wisdom, knowledge and experience to the table. In Northern Colorado, that group includes three agencies with more than 350 Christian volunteers working statewide in jails, prisons, youth-detention facilities, halfway houses and rehab centers. These three organizations offer more than 100 specific ministries serving some 30 state, county, federal and private penal institutions.
Collectively, we believe that the most significant and practical way to seriously reduce the cost of crime is to reduce the recidivism rate. Even a small, downward change would put an end to the need for new jails and prisons. Successful rehabilitation programs do exist, though few people are aware of them. These faith-based restoration projects operate quietly on shoestring budgets and receive little credit, notice or support from the communities in which they operate.
More than 80 such private charitable organizations have been identified statewide and some have attained remarkable success in reducing recidivism rates.
Two typical programs offer strong statistical evidence that recidivism is not an inevitable accompaniment to imprisonment:
The national Prison Fellowship InnerChange Freedom Initiative is a world-class jail and prison ministry founded by Chuck Colson, a former aide to President Nixon. Prison Fellowship pioneered the IFI concept, which is described as a "revolutionary, Christ-centered, Bible-based prison program that links mentors from local churches with prison inmates to work on their spiritual and moral transformation during the last year of incarceration."
The IFI program was itself inspired by a Brazilian experiment in which a prison was turned over to a Christian organization. Recidivism rates fell to historic lows, and Colson subsequently talked then-Gov. George W. Bush into trying out the concept in Texas. The experiments at the Carol S. Vance Unit in Richmond, Texas, were successful, and the program has since spread to Lino Lakes Correctional Facility in Minnesota, the Winfield Correctional Center in Kansas and the Newton Facility in Iowa. Colorado Gov. Bill Owens has endorsed the start-up of a program at Sterling Correctional Facility, working with faith-based groups to build a program similar to the IFI model.
IFI-styled programs begin with at least six months of intense, behind-bars mentoring, as well as vocational and life-skills development just prior to an inmate's parole. On release, those inmates are then teamed with community churches to help them re-establish a connection in the community. The process involves working with businessmen within the church to provide jobs, housing, food, transportation and clothing, while other church members provide continued mentoring in life skills, companionship and helping inmate families with their spiritual and physical needs.
On a local, much smaller scale, the Denver-based Emmanuel House ministry has been accepting parolees into its programs for eight years. During that time, nearly 90 men have gone through the program; just four of them returned to prison. That success rate should have raised some eyebrows among state officials. "But," says founder and director Joseph Mares, "Emmanuel House also suffers from being Christian-based and, as such, cannot be considered for public funding."
This issue of non-funding also impedes our work at Longmont-based Shekinah Christian Ministries. Shekinah is trying to establish five model restoration homes in Northern Colorado, based on the combined Prison Fellowship and Emmanuel House concepts, to house up to 100 Community Corrections parolees. We recently submitted a proposal to the Colorado legislature, with the assistance of Berthoud Rep. Kevin Lundberg, that funds be diverted from the Department of Corrections' appropriation to establish an innovative demonstration project applicable to communities statewide.
Each of these modest projects would save the state nearly $2 million annually, with potential savings of tens of millions as thousands of people are turned from lives of crime. In addition to dollar savings, we plan to demonstrate that recidivism rates of 5 percent to 10 percent are readily achievable through an easily replicated community and faith-based approach.
But the proposal received less-than-enthusiastic support, with opponents pointing to Article 5, Section 34 of the Colorado Constitution, which forbids the making of contracts with religious institutions. Rep. Mark Cloer of El Paso County has introduced legislation that would repeal this restrictive clause, but, as of this writing, no action has been taken.
We recognize that our proposals are bold. How can we be so sure of ourselves? For several reasons:
Faith-based programs are staffed in large part by volunteers who can operate far more efficiently than the paid staffs of the state's traditional halfway facilities.
Faith-based residents do their own cooking, laundry, painting, repairs, carpentry, cleaning, lawn mowing, etc. State-run facilities pay contractors to do most of these chores.
Most graduates of faith-based programs don't go back to jail (unlike 70 percent of the state's "graduates"), which translates to millions of dollars saved in cost-avoidance.
Restoration Home graduates move from the public dole to a private-enterprise payroll, where they pay taxes. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to project enormous financial benefits from such programs.
Even though programs of this type may exacerbate national tensions over the issue of separation of church and state, the ACLU, for one, does not plan to challenge such projects. Wayne Laugesen of Boulder Weekly Letters quotes Elizabeth Alexander, director of the National Prison Project for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C., as saying: "You won't get the standard ACLU response on this because the fact is that prison rehabilitation programs are almost nonexistent, and something has to change."
Now, all we have to do is get all of our state legislators to think as clearly on the topic as does the ACLU.
To allow current societal and governmental resistance to these programs to continue (simply because our methodology invokes the loving concern of a higher power) borders on the irrational. Think about it: If you oppose public funding for these programs, you are really saying that you prefer having hundreds of unrepentant felons released into your community each year rather than risk their being instilled with Christian values.
Or you might be tempted to say: "Let the churches handle it." My reply: It's a general community problem, not just a church problem. It's your tax dollars, and you are the victims.