PA justice system: Don’t go halfway on halfway houses

Halfway houses are perhaps the most valuable assets of our justice system.

Law-enforcement officials and the courts identify guilty citizens. Prisons punish those who have caused harm to society.

Halfway houses, at least theoretically, are the only part of the system designed to rehabilitate people. Here, soon-to-be released prisoners are supposed to learn skills so they can healthily recalibrate into society. Through halfway houses, our justice system becomes a restoration system.

Yet within the 52 community correction centers scattered across Pennsylvania, very little rehabilitation seems to be taking place.

In fact, according to a February report produced by the Corbett administration, our state’s halfway houses may actually be making things worse. Recidivism rates, the percentage of released prisoners who get rearrested or re-incarcerated within three years of release, are 67 percent among those who go through halfway houses, compared to 60 percent for prisoners released directly. Official rehab is less effective than the street.

There are several reasons to be alarmed by this statistic.

For one, prison reform has the potential to save the government billions of dollars. The United States spends roughly $65 billion a year jailing inmates, making recidivism reduction a budget priority. Halfway houses that don’t help rehabilitate ex-convicts are not only ineffective and unhelpful, they’re financially wasteful.

Secondly, Pennsylvania voters should be disturbed that this study occurs after a decade-long effort to divert resources toward halfway houses. For several years, the state has been spending $110 million annually to support a system for which it had no data and no method to track success. While complaining that universities like Pitt were being held unaccountable for their $134 million appropriation, legislators were writing a blank check for a useless program.

Also, the entire justification for privatization — that private competing firms would develop better practices at a cheaper cost — is nullified by the report. Rather than breaking new ground in rehabilitation, most halfway houses provide little actual support. As criminologist Edward Latessa of the University of Cincinnati said in The New York Times, taxpayer-funded rehabilitation programs are amounting to simply “paying to let inmates watch Jerry Springer.”

On a moral plane, it is difficult for a nation to claim to be a crucible of freedom and still have the highest incarceration rates in the developed world. And with disproportionate levels of African-Americans and other minorities behind bars as compared to other populations, the myth of social equality only slips further away.

Halfway houses must be a priority. Reducing recidivism is a complicated, unscientific process. A lack of studies make even a best-practices list difficult to assemble. The ultimate solution will come from a combination of competition among rehabilitation strategies and government regulations that direct this competition toward creating positive outcomes, as opposed to simply faster throughput.

While you will hopefully never need to interact with the prison and rehabilitation system, you deserve to live in a nation where it works well.