Team Trump Is Slashing Programs That Help Prisoners Adapt to Life on the Outside

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Team Trump Is Slashing Programs That Help Prisoners Adapt to Life on the Outside
“These changes…threaten to make our communities less safe.”

Samantha Michaels
Dec. 15, 2017 6:00 AM


On Wednesday at FCI Sandstone, a low-security federal prison in Minnesota, inmates were preparing for a congressional hearing. They couldn’t fly to Washington, of course, but they’d voted to add C-SPAN to the facility’s short list of authorized television channels. They planned to watch politicians grill the Trump administration’s new Bureau of Prisons chief about recent cuts to reentry programs.

The men wanted answers. In recent months, many had been told they were losing some or all of the time they’d been promised at the halfway houses where they were supposed to finish up their sentences, look for jobs, and get their feet back on the ground. Their families were upset, too: Now their loved ones would stay in prison longer and miss the winter holidays they’d hoped to celebrate together.

“This completely changed my release plan,” Nathaniel Augustus III Smith, one of the inmates at FCI Sandstone, told me in an email. He’d been looking forward to reuniting with family members in Texas in October. “Of the people I personally know that had halfway house dates, only one still retains his original date,” writes another prisoner, Timothy John Ehrmann, who has been preparing to leave for a halfway house ever since President Barack Obama commuted his sentence last year. “I can’t imagine what this is like systemwide.”

The lawmakers wanted answers, too. “It’s my understanding that there is some efforts to cut back on halfway houses,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, during Wednesday’s three-hour hearing, which covered everything from prison staffing to reentry programs.

Cummings was referring to reports from earlier this fall that the Bureau of Prisons had opted, for budgetary reasons, not to renew 16 of roughly 180 contracts for halfway houses, causing some of them—including a house in Duluth, near FCI Sandstone—to shut down: “Can you explain the rationale with regard to that, Mr. Inch?”

Mark Inch, who became the prisons director just three months ago, tried to assure Cummings. “There is absolutely no intent to cut back in the program,” he said. The contracts that weren’t renewed would only affect underused houses in low-population areas, he added—about 1 percent of the total bed space for federal halfway houses nationally. The changes, he said, were intended to make the reentry system more efficient.

Inmates and halfway house operators say otherwise. Over the past several months, hundreds of prisoners have reached out to the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, complaining that their halfway house dates have been delayed or their time in the houses has been significantly reduced. “The impact is widespread,” Molly Gill, the group’s vice president of policy, told me recently. “We’re talking thousands of inmates probably whose dates are being pushed back.”

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http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2017/12/team-trump-is-slashing-programs-that-help-prisoners-adapt-to-life-on-the-outside/