Return to Lesson Plan
For the first time, New York City officials from several agencies have agreed to create a comprehensive post-jail employment, drug treatment and housing plan that they say will prevent far more Rikers Island inmates from committing new crimes that return them to jail.
Though much of the concept is still being planned, some aspects, like a 6-week-old work program that pays Rikers inmates a weekly salary for picking up litter and scrubbing graffiti in city neighborhoods, are already under way.
"We may be on the way to unknotting this very difficult knot," Martin F. Horn, commissioner of the city's Department of Correction, said at a City Council committee hearing yesterday.
"Discharge planning," as the new effort to cut recidivism rates is called, has become a topic of intense interest to many state and municipal governments eager to stem the spiraling cost of imprisonment and close yawning budget deficits.
Nationally, two out of three discharged prisoners are rearrested within three years of release, according to a study last year by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, and that rate is expected to increase.
The city has never tried to offer outgoing inmates a comprehensive set of employment, housing and treatment programs to keep them from returning to jail, city officials and jail-reform advocates said.
"The fact that it's now at the city agency level is big," said Marta Nelson, director of Project Greenlight for the Vera Institute of Justice. The institute is working with the Departments of Correction and Health and Mental Hygiene to help outgoing inmates get birth certificates or Social Security cards — necessary documents to find a job. "This was not going on at the beginning of the year," Ms. Nelson said.
The idea for a coordinated jail-discharge plan began this year with Commissioner Horn, who organized meetings among commissioners and deputy commissioners from several departments, including Health and Mental Hygiene, Homeless Services and Employment. The group held its second daylong discharge-planning meeting on Thursday.
Though the plan is to help discharged city inmates stay out of trouble, a guiding force is the expected savings.
Almost half of discharged Rikers Island inmates are re-arrested within a year, 80 percent abuse drugs, 30 percent were homeless before going to jail, and 15 percent suffer from serious mental illnesses, Department of Correction statistics show.
It is an expensive confluence of problems. On average, each Rikers inmate — the jail's average daily population is about 13,900 — costs New York City more than $50,000 a year.
"You want to spend as much as you can in that period after they first get released" to avoid paying for jailing them again later, said Michael P. Jacobson, a former correction commissioner who is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The new effort to coordinate discharge planning is aimed primarily at Rikers Island inmates serving three-month to one-year jail terms, a small segment of a general inmate population consisting mainly of detainees awaiting court dates who leave the jail within a week.
Even for the city's sentenced inmates, the average jail stay is 39 days, requiring any post-release program to respond quickly and effectively to a changing set of people, Commissioner Horn said.
"I think the way that people are released from jails and prisons can certainly be more thoughtful than it has been," he said in an interview on Tuesday.
The Department of Correction's budget allocates about $3.8 million for discharge planning, city officials said. By most accounts, it is not nearly enough to address the needs of all outgoing inmates.
Thus far, only the jobs aspect of the Bloomberg administration's post-jail initiative has taken hold; city officials and prison experts said developing drug and mental health treatment programs and affordable housing would require millions of dollars and months of more planning.
Early accounts of the jobs program have been encouraging, advocates of jail-release programs said.
Since early August, about 280 Rikers inmates have begun minimum-wage jobs cleaning New York City neighborhoods of litter and graffiti and learning the value of earning a weekly paycheck that, hopefully, will translate into a steady job after jail, said John Feinblatt, New York City's criminal justice coordinator, who helped create the program.
By June, 2,800 inmates are expected to be in the jobs program; eventually, 5,000 Rikers inmates will be on the program's payroll, paid for mostly through a $2.5 million federal grant.
"An ex-con with a job is more likely to stay an ex-con," Mr. Feinblatt said.
At the end of yesterday's hearing, City Councilwoman Yvette D. Clarke, the chairwoman of the Council's Fire and Criminal Justice Services committee, said she was pleasantly surprised at the commitment the city had to inmate discharge planning. Many of the experts who spoke at the hearing agreed.
"The test is that it leads to a reduction in the re-arrest rates and leads to improved safety," said Nicholas Freudenberg, a professor of public health at Hunter College who spoke to the committee yesterday.