The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an editorial praising some of the initiatives the Daniels administration has taken with respect to re-integrating criminal offenders into society. The latest is apparently allowing offenders to apply for social service benefits, particularly medications, through FSSA before their release. For those offenders with mental illnesses a gap in medicine between their release and getting Medicaid to pay for their drugs is likely to have negative effects. This is significant because 80% of offenders have been diagnosed with either substance abuse or mental health problems – 40% have both. The Daniels administration also has initiatives designed to help these individuals find jobs and housing.
The editorial concludes:
This special government help for convicted criminals may seem galling to many taxpayers, who have already paid the costs of incarcerating prisoners. Why should returning offenders get anything more than a bus ticket home?
Consider that about 7,255 offenders are scheduled to be released from Indiana prisons in 2007 – 559 of them to Allen County. Left on their own, national statistics indicate, two-thirds of them will commit new crimes within three years, creating new victims, taxing citizens who pay the costs of the police, prosecutors, courts and prisons to handle them. Programs like those of the Daniels administration and Allen County’s innovative Re-Entry Court reduce recidivism.
The Daniels administration has shown welcome political courage in taking steps that, while bound to upset some Hoosiers, will ultimately best serve the state.
This is one of the few things Daniels has done that I find unobjectionable on its face. Therefore there has to be some dirty kicking back going on, perhaps to pharmaceutical companies, that I don’t know about. ;-)
More seriously, while this seems to be sound social policy, it is in tension with the rigid conservative approach to the penal system. That is, if you’re imprisoned, the only relevant issue is personal responsibility, and your will was utterly omnipotent in landing you there.
While the above isn’t the view of the legal system per se, which has all kinds of nuanced details and means of quantifying culpability — and which, of course, are perfectly legitimate when it’s an economic crime being prosecuted (see Skilling, Lay, Ebbers, the Rigas brothers, Kozlowski, et al.) — it’s not the red meat that is fed with Pentateuchal sound and fury to the conservative base.
I wonder who’s crunching the numbers to attack Daniels from the right on this.
Bravo, sir. Bravo.