Leaving prison once and for all: Helping ex-prisoners successfully return to society can greatly improve their chances of staying out of trouble.

• Author: Boulard, Garry

Robert E. Roberts knew the political earth had shifted when a bill or funding his Project Return came before the Louisiana Legislature last year, and a handful of conservative lawmakers widely known for their get-tough approach to crime came forward to sing the program's praises.

"That was a great moment for us," said Roberts, executive director of the New Orleans-based prisoner re-entry program started in 1994. "To have people, including a former Republican governor, who are from the 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' school, publicly support what we are doing not only gave us needed recognition, but showed that there's a real movement out there to do things differently."

One of those lawmakers, Senator John T. "Tom" Schedler, says his support for Project Return was based on economics. "We spend about $30,000 a year per person in prison. Frankly I don't see how we can afford to keep it up. Any program that can cut down on the large number of people who return to prison every year is going to get my support. It just makes good fiscal sense."

In a state where up to 5,000 men and women are released from prison and holding facilities every year--and some 1,800 are almost immediately returned due to parole violations--Roberts' program is a welcome relief.

Project Return makes a difference, he says. Its concept is dramatically simple: By offering what program managers call a "safe environment" for recently released inmates, the odds tangibly increase that ex-prisoners will succeed and not return to criminal behavior.

With more than half of its staff composed of former prison inmates, Project Return combines drug counseling, literacy training, computer skills training and job placement with group therapy workshops designed to bolster former inmates' self-esteem.

RECIDIVISM LESS THAN 10 PERCENT

Over the course of seven years, the recidivism rate among the excons entering Project Return's doors has been less than 10 percent during a time when the statewide average has topped 37 percent.

That figure looks even more promising when it's stacked against the 75 percent recidivism rate for former inmates who have been out for up to three years.

That Project Return has received national notice may have as much to do with its success rate as where it is located: Louisiana. The state has one of the largest-at roughly 30,000-inmate populations in the country and historically has not emphasized programs for either inmates or parolees.

That also means that Louisiana is a big prisoner-release state, equal to the far larger Florida, Illinois, New York and Ohio in the number of inmates-at least 14,000-who are returned to society every year. Louisiana's demographics increasingly mirror the nation's, which in the past decade has seen its prison population jump from less than 800,000 to more than 1.2 million.

And like Louisiana, the number of individuals being released from the nation's prisons is staggering: more than 600,000 people this year. Experts predict the same for each of the next several years. It's a phenomenon that Time magazine accurately describes as "the largest prison exodus in history," an exodus whose economic and social burden on the communities and families they return to, let alone the local economy that is expected to absorb them, is near incalculable.

HOMELESS, FRIENDLESS, DESTINED FOR TROUBLE

Even more challenging, according to a report released last summer by the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., nearly two-thirds of those 600,000 prisoners are expected to be re-arrested for serious misdemeanor or felony charges within three years. The report calls this the "cycle of removal and return" and says that the large numbers of former prisoners, mostly men, "are increasingly concentrated in a relatively small number of communities that already encounter enormous social and economic disadvantage."

"The implications are enormous," says Jeremy Travis, who co-authored the Urban Institute report, "From Prison to Home-The Dimensions and Consequences of Prisoner Re-entry."

"Every day more than 1,700 individuals will walk out of prison with minimal skills and education-oftentimes coping with serious drug problems-returning to communities where the social fabric is already torn and job opportunities for them are scarce," he says.

And those new releases will come on top of a parole population that has already reached an historic high. There are now more than 4.6 million people in the country on parole, according to the Department of Justice. Of that number, up to a quarter are homeless, friendless and destined for trouble.

"The numbers are overwhelming," agrees JoAnne Page, executive director of the Fortune Society in New York City. Up to 50 percent of the expected 14,000 people who will be released and returned to that city this year may end up homeless.

"Oftentimes, the families they are returning to are in worse trouble than the people being released," says Page. "Many former inmates try to make it in shelters, but those shelters can be dangerous, which ultimately means that many of our clients have preferred to live on their own in the parks.

"We see many more people coming out with more needs than we can possibly meet," Page says. Her nonprofit Fortune Society is dedicated to making the transition...