Donald Trump has spent the year doing the opposite of what judge-turned-Congressional candidate Tim Bjorkman recommends. Trump’s Bureau of Prisons, under the Department of Justice, has been dropping contracts with sixteen halfway houses for federal prisoners. These facilities provide the supervision and services that help keep offenders from landing back in jail:
Halfway houses, or “residential re-entry centers” in federal prison lingo, help manage the transition for federal prisoners from incarceration to freedom. According to the Bureau of Prisons, the facilities “provide a safe, structured, supervised environment, as well as employment counseling, job placement, financial management assistance and other programs and services” [Eli Watkins, “Bureau of Prisons Ending Contracts with 16 Halfway Houses,” CNN, 2017.11.20].
In an October 26 letter to Bureau of Prisons director Mark Inch and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, eight Senators expressed concern that the Bureau of Prisons is also delaying scheduled releases to halfway houses and reducing the rehabilitative programs it requires halfway houses to offer:
We write to express serious concerns about the Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) revised Statement of Work (SOW) for Residential Reentry Centers (RRCs), which appears to eliminate Cognitive Behavioral Programming (CBP) and a Social Services Coordinator (SSC) position. We believe that these changes in programming and personnel will compromise public safety, decrease inmate accountability, and lead to increased recidivism rates. We also understand that the BOP is reducing its use of Residential Reentry Centers without explanation or advance notice to those most affected. As a consequence, inmates are spending more time in prison, being released directly from prison into the community without the necessary supervision, or spending insufficient time in transitional facilities. These changes, particularly in the absence of a justification, threaten to make our communities less safe while increasing BOP operating costs over time [Senators Cornyn, Grassley, Portman, Tillis, Whitehouse, Klobuchar, Franken, and Schatz, letter to BOP/DOJ, 2017.10.27].
Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, expanded on these concerns in written testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on December 13:
We are concerned that decreasing the length of halfway house stays across the board could harm public safety in ways the BOP did not fully evaluate. First, hundreds of prisoners reported to us that the time they had been told they would spend in a halfway house has been reduced to a period of two to four months. Many of these prisoners have spent five, 10, 15, or 20 years or more in prison and feel they need more time in a halfway house to find the jobs, housing, and community support they will need to stay crime-free. Shortening community reentry time can have serious public safety implications.
…Cuts to rehabilitative programming and qualified staff at halfway houses also present public safety concerns. This is especially true because federal prisons are too often failing to rehabilitate people. Our prisoner survey of June 2017 found a disturbing lack of high-quality, meaningful rehabilitative programming in federal prisons, from jobs to mental health and cognitive behavioral therapy to education. For example, only three percent of prisoners reported having access to computers while incarcerated, yet today’s job market is almost entirely online. The quality and availability of educational classes in prisons is uneven at best, and most classes are taught solely by other inmates or unqualified staff, prisoners reported. Job training programs are highly coveted but scarce. Only one-third of prisoners who had jobs reported working at least a 40-hour work week, mostly in make-work jobs that contributed to keeping the facility running. Nearly 70 percent of prisoners did not receive any mental or cognitive behavioral health treatment in prison – exactly the programming BOP has now eliminated from the Statement of Work for halfway house contractors [Kevin Ring, written statement, submitted to House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, 2017.12.13].
Ring also says the BOP cuts have harmed offenders and their families emotionally and financially:
Even if the halfway house closures and capacity reductions could be justified on public safety grounds, the BOP’s abrupt implementation of these cuts has caused significant hardship for families. FAMM has heard from numerous prisoners who were planning to spend the holidays together with their families for the first time in years and had already made costly travel plans when they learned that they would be required to stay in prison another few months.
It is important to appreciate how much “getting a date” for release means for prisoners and their families. It is the light at the end of a dark tunnel, an event that families plan and prepare for, a source of both fear and joyful anticipation. We have heard from prisoners who secured jobs and start-work dates based on their anticipated halfway house release date; families who moved or changed housing arrangements to accommodate a loved one coming to live with them; parents and children who scheduled medical treatment for themselves and/or their returning family member. The BOP’s cuts to halfway houses have upended this careful planning and psychological preparation for hundreds of families in states all across the country. In too many cases, a person’s halfway house date has been changed multiple times, putting both prisoner and family on an emotional and financial rollercoaster it is hard for those of us who are not in prison to appreciate [Ring, 2017.12.13].
The Bureau of Prisons says it’s saving money by focusing these cuts on (Reuters’s words) “areas with small populations or underutilized centers“:
Federal judges who spoke to Reuters said the cuts are having an impact in their districts, particularly in states with fewer facilities or larger geographic areas where the nearest center might be several hundred miles away [Sarah N. Lynch and Julia Harte, “Trump Administration Reduces Support for Prisoner Halfway Houses,” Reuters, 2017.10.13].
Among the rural areas forgotten by the Trump BOP is South Dakota, where the feds are dropping their contract with Dakota Counseling Institute in Mitchell:
This means, for federal prisoners returning to Lake Andes, Wagner, Lower Brule, Fort Thompson and Eagle Butte areas, the next closest halfway house is in Sioux Falls or Rapid City.
“What that does to our people in South Dakota, it puts a crunch on the middle part of the state,” said clinical supervisor at Stepping Stones, Janae Oetken [Libby Leyden, “Bureau of Prisons to End Contract with Dakota Counseling Institute,” Mitchell Daily Republic, 2017.12.23].
Donald Trump says he cares about rural America, but he’s cutting programs that make rural America safer and more productive. Next year, we need to send some sensible rural Congresspeople to Washington to fight Trump and undo the damage he’s doing.
maybe that policy could be more shortsighted, but it’s hard to imagine how…
Haven’t we been down this road before? This will not end well for communities, families, and the formerly incarcerated as they struggle to get their lives back on track without the proper resources. Trump’s administration is cutting half-way house funding so recidivism increases and we have more people back in expensive prisons. We save $1 on reintegration costs so we can spend five or ten or twenty times that amount on increased criminal justice and prison costs. This sounds like a typical thoughtless Trump program.
Recidivism into for profit prisons equals more campaign cash for the party of family values-Mob family values.