When Prisoners Come Home was the seventh book I read in 2009

Why I read When Prisoners Come Home:

On March 27 of this year, Carole relayed an email message from Professor Joan Petersilia, a distinguished criminologist who is now Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. She was writing a new book on corrections and invited me to contribute a chapter on living in prison. I considered Professor Petersilia’s invitation a huge honor and eagerly accepted. I wrote her a lengthy letter with an outline of what I would write. Professor Petersilia sent me this copy of When Prisoners Come Home.

What I learned from reading When Prisoners Come Home:

This was the first academic book I have read in many years, and I enjoyed reading it more than any other academic book that I can remember. The subject matter was and is of intense interest to me for obvious reasons. This book alarmed me with the horrifying statistics, some of which I knew, others of which I did not. I knew about the high recidivism rates, of course, as I have been reading for years that two out of every three released prisoners return to confinement.

What I did not know prior to reading Professor Petersilia’s book was the overwhelming reluctance employers have in hiring people with prison records. She pointed to studies that showed the high percentage of employers who affirmed that they would never hire someone with a drug conviction or prison record.

Reading books like Professor Petersilia wrote validate the concerns I have had about the obstacles I expect to face upon release. That is why I must continue working hard every day. I must overcome those obstacles by preparing myself in unconventional ways. That includes improving my fitness level, strengthening my communication skills, enhancing my resume with more publishing credentials, nurturing my marriage, and building a stronger network of support that will have a vested interest in my success upon release.

How reading When Prisoners Come Home will contribute to my success upon release:

I am convinced that the more I know about the challenges that await me, the better I can prepare to overcome them. In reading this book, I have gained more knowledge I can use to convey to audiences I expect to address as a speaker, consultant, and teacher. I am recommending this book to other prisoners. Although Professor Petersilia wrote the book for academia, prisoners should read her work as well in order to grasp the importance of preparing for release.

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David Fathi wrote about our “dysfunctional criminal justice system” for the Huffington Post. He points out the depressing statistics with the United States incarcerating 762 residents out of every 100,000. This figure compares unfavorably to other countries like Canada, that incarcerates 116 residents out of every 100,000; Japan incarcerates 63 residents out of every 100,000. The United States, it seems, is becoming more of a prison nation.

In Professor Joan Petersilia’s book When Prisoners Come Home, she wrote that in 1970, America incarcerated a total of 196,000 prisoners. In The Second Chance Act, Congress reported that America now incarcerates more than 2.3 million people. Does America feel safer with this increase that exceeds 1,000 percent?

The idea of closing prison camps is not without support from professionals who know prisons best. Earlier in my prison journey I had an opportunity to interview Warden Dennis Luther. At the time, Mr. Luther was the longest tenured warden in the Bureau of Prisons. As I was interviewing Warden Luther in his office as preparations for my master’s thesis at Hofstra University, he told me that prison camps did not serve a useful purpose. Anyone serving time in a camp, Warden Luther said, ought to be on home confinement or in a community based correctional program. That way those minimum security prisoners could pay their own costs of confinement while simultaneously providing service to society.

I have been incarcerated for 22 years, the past six of which I’ve served in three separate federal prison camps. I have held job assignments that have placed me in society without supervision. One job assignment required that I drive on a public road at midnight without staff supervision. I don’t grasp the purpose of such unnecessary imprisonment.

President Obama has called for cuts to unnecessary spending projects. Taxpayers ought to question the hundreds of millions it costs each year to confine nonviolent and nonthreating offenders in minimum-security camps.

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My 22 years of experience as a federal prisoner give me a strong opinion on the reasons that our system of corrections breeds so much failure. The prisons in which I have been held extinguish hope. They do not encourage those who strive to prepare for law abiding lives upon release. The consequence of this flawed policy, from my perspective, is that prisoners who struggle to sustain focus through incarceration abandon adjustment patterns that could help them prepare for law-abiding lives upon release. Instead, they embrace adjustment patterns that lead to continuing cycles of failure.

Professor Petersilia reports some of the findings from her distinguished colleague, Professor James Q. Wilson. For many years I have read of Professor Wilson’s work. He is well known for his 1985 book Thinking About Crime, in which he wrote that prisons ought to isolate and punish. I’ve served my entire sentence in prisons designed not only to isolate and punish, but also to extinguish hope. The high recidivism rates that the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported represent the fallout from such myopic objectives.

The problem with prisons is that they condition people to live inside boundaries, though they simultaneously condition people to fail upon release. We need prison reforms that would lower recidivism rates and simultaneously lower prison operating costs. The way to accomplish such goals would require fundamental changes with the ways administrators manage prisons.

Rather than extinguishing hope and erecting barriers that obstruct prisoners from preparing offenders for law-abiding lives upon release, administrators ought to implement incentive programs that encourage the opposite. As Justice Burger once said in his speech Factories with Fences. We need prison reforms that will encourage offenders to earn and learn their way to freedom.

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