The Federal Interagency Re-entry Council, whose purpose is to help released inmates become productive citizens, is rightly pushing the states to help ex-offenders find jobs, housing, drug treatment, training and the other tools that will give them a reasonable chance of staying out of prison. But the federally financed halfway houses that are supposed to smooth this transition appear to be failing to keep their end of the bargain.
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As reported recently by The Times's Sam Dolnick, the Bureau of Prisons spent more than $300 million last year on contracts with private halfway-house service providers — nearly three times the amount spent just a decade ago. The money has drawn considerable interest from private companies that hope to profit from running halfway houses, even though they often do not offer the intensive social services that inmates need to make the transition or the resources to provide them.
A federally financed study of about 40,000 former inmates who were released from federal prison in 2004 and in 2007 found that nearly everything about most of the halfway houses studied — services, record-keeping, client assessment — was haphazard. Beyond that, the 2010 study, done by the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence at George Mason University, found that parking ex-offenders in residential re-entry centers, as they are known, did not improve their chances of staying out of trouble.
The lead author of the study, Prof. Faye Taxman, told The Times that federal corrections officials did not "have an expectation of what they want to accomplish" with the halfway houses, and saw them as "just places to move people closer to home." The study called on Washington to remake the system from the ground up, and to create performance-based contracts that emphasize education and employment, which decrease the likelihood that released prisoners will end up right back inside.
A Brooklyn halfway house described in the article dramatizes the need for stronger oversight. The facility is run by a nonprofit called Community First Services, under a $29 million contract with the federal government. The Times found that the group had padded the résumé of its chief executive, Jack Brown III, falsely claiming that he was a gulf war combat veteran. It also inflated its business history — claiming on its Web site that it was "currently funded by or developing projects with" seven government agencies and that it had several partnerships with major nonprofit groups.
In October, the New York State comptroller rejected a contract that would have allowed Community First to run a residential program for state parolees, after a review uncovered "a disturbing pattern of ethical violations" by Mr. Brown — a key figure in a notorious Albany lobbying scandal in 2003.
As for the halfway house itself, inmates and defense lawyers disclosed that residents receive few services, and that some spend their days playing cards, ordering takeout food and watching videos. At night, they talk on cellphones, which are supposed to be banned, and drink contraband alcohol. One official at Federal Defenders of New York, a nonprofit legal group, described the halfway house as "a big hindrance" to the reintegration process, so much so that lawyers try to keep clients away from the place.
There is no way to know how widespread these kinds of problems are. But the federal government clearly needs to set a higher bar for these programs and promptly cancel the contracts of those that do not reach an exacting standard.
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