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Dropping the baton: Is recidivism the wrong metric for measuring reentry success?

At yesterday's House Corrections Committee hearing, Dee Wilson of TDCJ's new Reentry division likened the failures of the criminal justice system to a dropped baton in a 4x100 relay. Cops hand inmates off to jails who hand them off to probation or prison, she said (probation can also "hand them off" to prison), then prison hands them off either to parole or to society at large through direct discharge. At too many points in the process, she said, institutional players drop the baton, often because of a failure to share information, accurately assess inmates, and act on those assessments.Half of the 72,000 people released from TDCJ each year are "flat discharges," said Wilson - people with whom the system loses contact entirely after their release...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on July 01, 2010 (boomark / email).