Re-entry center benefits abound

By BEN SIMPSON

This My Turn will discuss my personal opinions regarding the possible location of an Idaho Department of Correction re-entry center for North Idaho in Kootenai County.

I have been an attorney in North Idaho since 1984 and was a magistrate and a district judge in Kootenai County from 2000 until August 2019. I have been intimately involved in the criminal process during all of that time. Judges are ethically prohibited from offering opinions on political issues, but since I am no longer a judge, I am able to offer my opinions and I feel it is important I do so on this matter of public interest.

Probably 99 percent of convicted felons are released from prison and return to society after sentencing. Most of those released return to the communities where they lived before conviction. When they are released, how are they prepared to become functioning and law-abiding members of society?

If they served only a local jail-sentence they will not have received any vocational training, rehabilitation, mental health treatment, or drug treatment before their release. If they served a prison-term they were not eligible for any programming until they are within one year of probation or parole release. If they served a retained jurisdiction (an in-custody pre-release program), they will have received several hundred hours of counseling, job training, drug treatment, and behavioral modification training before release to probation.

Question, does forced programming in custody as a condition of release work? Why not give them this programming in a more effective, less restrictive and less expensive, setting where they voluntarily participate? The pre-release center program provides a bridge to community release. If participants do not meaningfully engage in the pre-release program, they can be returned to prison immediately.

Currently when release occurs, a felon is given a few clothes, a few dollars, 30 days of medications, is ordered to live at an approved address, is ordered to report to probation or parole right away and is ordered to comply with specific conditions of probation or parole. I will leave the statistics of how overworked the parole and probation officers are to the Idaho Department of Correction, but it is clear they do not have adequate programs, financial, resources, or human resources to properly supervise felons under their jurisdiction.

As a result, a large percentage of probationers, parolees, and felons violate the terms of their release or re-offend and are returned to custody. The Department of Correction has the resources to react to bad behavior, but it does not have the resources to adequately encourage and to reward good behavior. The large number of re-incarcerations could be substantially reduced if the Department of Correction had the resources to ensure that the felons they supervise stay clean and sober, go to counseling, don’t associate with criminals, get a job, pay restitution to victims, and don’t commit new crimes. The pre-release program provides one means to economically accomplish these goals.

Why should we care if felons are sent back to prison: first because many of them are sent back to prison for committing new crimes which create economic damage, and or, danger to the public; second, we need all the productive members of society we can get; third because incarceration is very expensive.

The state legislative corrections budget for 2020 is more than $309,000,000. We can all probably agree we could put much of this money to better use. The Idaho re-entry program offers an alternative to reduce the prison population and the corrections budget. It costs far less to have someone in a transitional housing situation who pays fines and restitution than it does to house them in prison. This program offers NON-VIOLENT inmates near release the opportunity to obtain housing, a job, vocational training, counseling, drug testing, and a gradual return to freedom under close supervision. It is freedom on training wheels if you will.

Experience out of southern Idaho is that this program substantially reduces recidivism rates. No program can eliminate all re-offenses. Because inmates who complete this program have a safety net in place when they are released, they have the ability and the incentive to succeed and they have a far greater chance of staying out of prison. Sure, some of them will still re-offend, but those who do are likely to do so anyway. Many however will succeed and become law-abiding, productive members of society.

I have read the recent letters to the editor. My Turns and other articles on this subject. All of them state valid points. However, those by Eve Knudtsen and Jennifer Passaro both shed light on the potentially substantial value of a re-entry center for Kootenai County.

One of the most frustrating things for me as an attorney and as a judge was to watch the high percentage of parolees and probationers return to custody simply because they were released without the tools necessary to succeed. As has been said before, these people are coming back to this community anyway. There are 2,000 parolees and probationers in North Idaho now. Let’s help future releasees succeed for our own good, as well as theirs. We will all be safer if these people are contributing members of society who are not committing new crimes. I support the pre-release center proposal because implementing this program will make our community safer, it will rehabilitate criminals, it will strengthen their families, and it will save critical taxpayer funds.

Kootenai County is the best location in the five northern counties for the center because it has the public transportation, employers, housing, and professional infrastructure necessary to successfully implement the program.

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Ben Simpson is a Coeur d’Alene resident.