SACRAMENTO — By insisting that California make rehabilitation a focus of prison life, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is joining a national movement of political leaders who believe it is time for a new approach to incarceration.
For almost three decades, politicians have belittled efforts to rehabilitate inmates as ineffective mollycoddling. Led by California, the nation undertook a prison building binge and adopted tough crime laws that pushed the population behind bars past 2 million.
Now, with states under persistent economic stress and evidence showing that most inmates are rearrested within three years of release, lawmakers across the country are acknowledging the need for change. There is now broad agreement that locking up and mostly ignoring offenders has been far from a cure-all for crime.
With bipartisan support, states small and large are shortening criminal sentences, restoring early release for good behavior, diverting drug offenders to treatment and beefing up efforts to help parolees rejoin society.
And in Congress, a Republican senator from Kansas soon will introduce the Second Chance Act, which would dedicate millions of federal dollars to helping ex-convicts find jobs, housing and treatment for mental illness and addiction.
"Even in stark economic terms, it's become very difficult to argue that our investment in prisons is delivering a great result," said Michael Jacobson, who ran New York City's jails and probation system in the 1990s and wrote a just-released book on incarceration. "So I think we're at a historic moment when ... conditions are ripe for dramatic reform."
Many states already are well on their way, pursuing new approaches that, while unproven by hard data, are showing promise and thinning out prison populations after decades of steady growth.
The changes generating the most excitement come under a new label -- reentry.
Unlike rehabilitation, reentry reflects a reality about corrections that often escapes public notice: About 95% of all offenders -- about 600,000 people a year nationwide -- will be going home.
Reginald Wilkinson, chief of Ohio's prison system, said helping felons move from the cell to the neighborhood was simply good public safety: "I often ask the question, 'Who would you rather sit next to on a bus? A person who is very, very angry about their prison experience and untrained and uneducated? Or a person who obtained a GED and vocational training in prison and is on his or her way to work?"
