Prison and Its Aftermath

Prison and Its Aftermath

At our church's Men's Prayer Breakfast this morning, we were talking about what the church can do to help those coming out of prison. The guy next to me at the table is a guard at the women's prison near Boise; the senior pastor is suddenly getting lots of mail from prisoners who hear his local radio show, asking him to pray for them when they get out.

The prison guard (whose name I used to know, but I seem to have forgotten) told me that a lot of the inmates, once they get out, spiral back down again--usually because the same drug and alcohol problems that got them in prison in the first place, come and grab them again. He indicated that relatively few of the women in the prison are there on drug charges directly--but many are there because they turned to forgery or other financial crimes to pay for their addiction problems.

This is one of the depressing realities that a lot of liberals (who want to blame capitalism) and libertarians (who want to blame drug laws) seem to be missing: addiction, even to legal and relatively cheap drugs like alcohol, destroys a lot of people, taking them down paths of criminality and personal degradation.

I used the opportunity to remind everyone at the table that with along with these problems, at least here in the Boise area, released felons have a heck of a time finding not only jobs, but even places to live. Many landlords won't rent to ex-felons, often for as much as ten years after release.

I understand the reluctance of employers and landlords. Would it be wise to put someone convicted of embezzlement in charge of the company safe? Probably not. Someone convicted of manufacturing meth--well, I can see why a landlord might be reluctant to see a house or even an entire apartment building condemned because someone built a meth lab in it. But not every felony conviction necessarily involves those same risks. A rigid rule about ex-felons probably doesn't make any sense--and perhaps there needs to be a bit more thought as to what felony convictions actually justify denying the ex-felon certain jobs.

I've done a bit of digging around through early Republic sources, and it is interesting that Pennsylvania, when it started on its campaign of prison reform in the 1785-1810 period, did something rather radical. Once a prisoner was considered rehabilitated, and he was released from prison, he wasn't an ex-felon--the governor pardoned him. What is rather astonishing about this is that at least at the beginning, this actually seemed to work pretty well. And then, for some reason, the system stopped working so well.

Of course, in the early stages, inmates were confined to a cell with a Bible. The word "penitentiary" comes from "penitent." It was a fiercely, unabashedly Christian system, designed to break the hardness of the criminal's heart, in the hopes that he would not just that what he did was pragmatically bad, but that it was wrong.

Pretty obviously, we won't be going to back to that approach in post-Christian ACLU America.