About 25,000 adults and juveniles are released each year from Illinois prisons. Two in five will return within three years — many for violent offenses. This recidivism takes a staggering human and fiscal toll. It also invites a series of important questions.
Do our leaders have the vision, the ingenuity and the courage to move past the sound bite in order to take a bigger bite out of crime? Can we enhance public safety while halting the costly proliferation of prisons? Can we dramatically reduce the number of repeat offenders by doing a better job of monitoring, mentoring and managing them after they return to their communities? Are there more effective alternatives to imprisonment, particularly for nonviolent offenders?
During the last two decades, Illinois has added 24 correctional institutions — more than one a year. The operating budget for the Department of Corrections has soared from $116.7 million in fiscal year 1978 to $1.05 billion this fiscal year. That 800 percent increase for corrections compares with a 228 percent overall boost in general revenue funds appropriations and a 188 percent climb in state outlays for elementary and secondary education.
Many factors fueled the explosion in prison construction and the accompanying surge in spending on prison operations. Drugs, the breakdown of the nuclear family and gangs all contributed.
So did a spate of laws in response to these problems. Governors and legislators established mandatory minimum sentences, stripping discretion from a judiciary largely viewed as too lenient. This reaction to increased violence on our streets was predictable, and responsive to mainstream public opinion. But it also, at least in part, reflected a political expediency that militates against thoughtful, comprehensive public policy. "Lock 'em up and throw away the key" represents a realistic approach to handling the most violent of our offenders. However, it is unrealistic to employ this approach as the singular, pervasive component of a corrections strategy.
Not all crimes — not even all felonies — call for a life sentence without parole. That means thousands of inmates each and every
28 / May 1999 Illinois Issues
Illinois Issues May 1999 / 29
Initiatives to reduce
recidivism and
prevent crime
require investments
that may not pay
big dividends in
the short term,
meaning the next
election. There
may be risks for
those who support a
re-energizing and
revamping of
rehabilitation efforts.
year into the foreseeable future will
return to the streets of Illinois —
most of them to the very communities and neighborhoods in which they
committed their crimes — many, if
not most, of them to the very circumstances that induced or fostered their
unlawful behavior. The drug traffic
likely is still there and so are the
gangs. If ex-offenders lack the skills
to hold a legitimate job, the alternatives of unemployment or illegal
employment will loom large.
It is time to address this stark
reality squarely and boldly. We need
to retool and reinvigorate our parole
system in Illinois. Indeed, we need to
do much, much more generally at the
community level to combat crime at
its roots.
This approach does not require
repealing all of the mandatory sentencing laws that have been enacted
over the years. It does not preclude
enacting more of them. It.does not
mean blaming society instead of the
criminal. It does mean reinstating
rehabilitation as a worthwhile objective of the criminal justice system
when it comes to dealing with those
inmates who will return to society at
some point. And it does mean
demanding from our elected officials
and ourselves an anti-crime strategy
that goes well beyond more punishment and more police.
It will take a big-picture view —
one that extends the policy-making
horizon beyond the next election. But
there is a tremendous potential for
forging consensus on major reforms
in our parole system and more
expansive crime prevention initiatives, even among those who hold
widely divergent views on mandatory
sentencing and some other criminal
justice issues.
Our efforts to supervise parolees
have been under fire for a long time.
Critics run the gamut of the political
spectrum. Conservatives tend to
focus on inadequate monitoring.
Liberals tend to focus on the lack of
comprehensive drug treatment and
job counseling services for parolees.
Actually, a good system requires
additional staffing and comprehensive services, a combination that both
liberals and conservatives could be
convinced to support.
Soon after taking the reins of state
government, Gov. George Ryan took
the first steps to keep a campaign
promise to double the number of
parole agents. Even with the increase
he pledged as a candidate, however,
there will be 366 agents, compared to
33,663 parolees — or one agent for
every 92 parolees.
There will not be — and likely
never will be — enough agents to
provide the constant monitoring that
some citizens might expect. But the
expectation is unrealistic. We cannot
count on parole agents to be our first
line of defense against crime — even
offenses by parolees. The police have
primary responsibility in that regard.
But it is realistic to expect a parole
system to affect recidivism significantly if it operates strategically and
can marshal necessary resources at
the community level. Effective parole
focuses resources on the intensive
supervision and treatment of those
inmates deemed more likely to repeat
violent crimes.
Effective parole makes an agent
more case manager than cop. It
empowers that case manager to
require participation in substance
abuse and sex offender programs. It
empowers him or her to require
parolees to participate in programs
to make them more employable.
Effective parole also demands,
mobilizes and coordinates government and not-for-profit resources at
the community level to assure that
good vocational, educational and
social services are readily available to
the case manager and to the parolee.
Effective parole also depends upon
drug treatment, educational and
employment programs in the prisons
so that parolees are better prepared
to deal with the inevitable pressures
when they return to society.
Former Gov. Jim Edgar began
moving toward a more effective
approach to parole almost immediately after becoming the state's chief
executive. He did so largely in
response to the budget crisis he
inherited: It made sense to focus the
state's limited resources on drug and
30 / May 1999 Illinois Issues
sex offenders requiring the most
intensive supervision. An early
assessment of that effort by criminal
justice professor Thomas Castellano
of Southern Illinois University found
the effort promising but insufficiently
funded as Edgar continued to
grapple with putting the state's fiscal
house back in order.
To be sure, it will take a huge
investment to fully fund a full-scale
attack on recidivism and to operate
programs at the community level
designed to prevent crime, particularly among juveniles. Let's not kid
ourselves about that. But money is
not the only answer. To the contrary,
it makes no sense to pour dollars into
inefficient and ineffective programs.
But it also makes no sense to shortchange potentially successful
anti-recidivism and other crime
prevention efforts, particularly when
one considers that such neglect
virtually will assure continued
escalation in spending for prisons.
Alternatives to that escalation,
including an overhaul of the parole
system, were discussed by criminal
justice experts from throughout the
state and the nation a few months
ago on the Carbondale campus of
Southern Illinois University. Prosecutors, judges, current and former
chiefs of state prison systems, parole
authorities and former inmates
offered their recommendations at a
symposium hosted by SIU's Public
Policy Institute, School of Law and
Center for the Study of Crime,
Delinquency and Corrections.
For instance, Joseph Hartzler of
Springfield, who led the federal
prosecution of Oklahoma City
bomber Timothy McVeigh, argued
for more expansive efforts to curb the
demand for drugs. Others stressed
the need to restrict long-term prison
sentences to violent criminals and to
expand the use of probation and
other alternative punishments that
emphasize restitution and accountability to victims and society. Still
others advocated early intervention
and prevention programs, including
identification of emotionally
disturbed children at an early age
and the development of individual
education plans for at-risk children
in our schools. All of those
approaches, including a dramatic
overhaul of the parole system, carry
substantial price tags.
'To achieve long-term
success in protecting
the public safety,
elected officials may
well have to display
statesmanship and
courage — turning
away from easy
slogan-friendly
responses to crime
and toward
approaches that
actually will produce
better results.'
Demonstrating his commitment to
rehabilitation, Gov. Ryan proposed
in his first budget a 13 percent
increase, from $141 million to nearly
$160 million in drug treatment funding. But even that substantial boost
will not eliminate the waiting lists of
those seeking services.
Without question, initiatives to
reduce recidivism and prevent crime
require investments that may not pay
big dividends in the short term,
meaning before the next election.
Moreover, there may be political
risks for those who support a
re-energizing and revamping of
rehabilitation efforts. If the state
moves more boldly into intensive
supervision of parolees most likely to
repeat their offenses, it means less
scrutiny of others. And if one of the
unlikely repeaters commits a horrible
crime, the media and political
opponents likely will second-guess
the policies and votes that reformed
the system — even if the successes far
outweigh the failures.
A statement issued at the close of
the SIU symposium by the Public
Policy Institute confronted the
political and governmental tensions
directly. "There will be significant
costs to many of these initiatives. But
there are also costs — in both fiscal
and human terms — to building one
prison after another and failing to
reduce recidivism among offenders
who return to our neighborhoods
and communities.
"To achieve long-term success in
protecting the public safety, elected
officials may well have to display
statesmanship and courage — turning away from easy, slogan-friendly
responses to crime and toward
approaches that actually will produce
better results. We should ask nothing
less of them."
Mike Lawrence, a former journalist and
senior adviser to Gov. Edgar, is associate
director of the Public Policy Institute at
the Carbondale campus of Southern
Illinois University.
Illinois Issues May 1999 / 31
To be sure, it will
take a huge
investment to fully
fund a full-scale
attack on recidivism
and to operate
programs at the
community level
designed to prevent
crime, particularly
among juveniles.
Let's not kid
ourselves about that.