behinds-bars-photoLast year Gov. Bill Richardson promised a reform of the state’s corrections system. Then the economy tanked. And corrections reform receded as state lawmakers worked triage on the budget during this year’s 60-day legislative session.

Now the governor is touting prison reform again, this time for the 2010 legislative session. He also recently appointed a panel — called a Re-Entry Council — to carry out the work of an earlier task force that last year issued a list of reform recommendations.

“I’m going to make prison reform a priority in the January session — treatment, rehabilitation, funding issues. A lot of those will be at the forefront,” Richardson said recently.

While New Mexico’s prisons aren’t as overcrowded as they are in other states, the state’s system still grapples with a host of issues, including: recidivism, or the number of offenders who return to lockup within 36 months after their release; offender drug use; and the difficulty offenders face in finding gainful employment when they return to society.

According to a report issued by the last year’s Prison Reform Task Force, the problems are often interconnected.

Currently, New Mexico’s 47 percent recidivism rate is lower than the national average of 52 percent, according to the New Mexico Sentencing Commission.

But at nearly half, that rate has prompted the governor and others to acknowledge the importance of slowing down what some call the “revolving door” of offenders who wind up back behind bars.

One strategy already identified is increasing treatment of drug addictions as an alternative to incarcerating drug offenders.

Treating drug addiction

Last year’s task force report found that more than a quarter of prison inmates in New Mexico are drug offenders, and about 85 percent of the prison population has substance abuse problems once they enter prison.

New Mexico, like many states and the federal government, already is debating the merits of treatment as a way to keep drug offenders from being sent to prison. A bill during this past legislative session to give state judges more discretion to impose treatment rather than time behind bars for drug offenders died in committee.

Perhaps sensing an opportunity given the state’s recent belt-tightening, supporters of drug treatment have tried to frame treatment as a cost-saving measure.

“The savings could be tremendous,” says Reena Szczepanski of the Drug Policy Alliance New Mexico, which pushed this year’s treatment bill.

As the task force report noted, substance abuse treatment programs range in cost from $1,800 to $6,800 annually per person, depending on frequency and type of treatment. That compares with $31,755 a year — or $87 a day — that the state spends now to incarcerate an offender.

Given that, the task force recommended that the state open more drug and mental health courts, as well as halfway houses.

Szczepanski, who sits on the Re-Entry Council, admits that the need for some front-end investment may dampen support among policy makers.

But it’s a strategy steadily gaining steam across the country, she says. The White House and Congress recently also adopted that approach, wanting to see more drug courts, and increasing funding for the program 250 percent in the federal spending bill signed in March.

More education opportunities

The task force report also emphasized the importance of education in reducing recidivism and urged the state to do more for offenders — even to the point of starting charter schools in prisons.

As it stands, few inmates could be classified as beneficiaries of a good education in New Mexico’s prisons. According to the corrections department’s 2007 annual report, fewer than 20 of more than 6,000 inmates had some college while nearly half had only a high school diploma. Meanwhile, the task force report noted that 32 percent of inmates tested at or below the sixth grade reading level and math level and 10 percent scored at or below the third grade level in reading and math.

Beyond charter schools and improved educational programs, the report also suggested expanding a pilot project of a concept well known to the Navajo Nation called restorative justice panels.

Restorative justice is a “formal mediation process” that — in the words of the report — gives the offender the opportunity to learn about the consequences of his or her actions and sets the stage to engage the offender in some form of restitution, be it community service, financial compensation or direct service to the victim.

One study in Vermont that tracked 10,000 ex-prisoners over eight years to compare the results of restorative justice versus traditional probation, found a 23 percent lower recidivism rate among those enrolled in the restorative justice programs.

The importance of life skills and gainful employment

Beyond education, offenders also often need to learn the ABCs of life on the outside, which is why the task force recommended a re-integration process that begins the moment an offender enters the prison system.

Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez is a fan of teaching inmates life skills in prison.

“We have to take better advantage of the captive audience; otherwise, we’re just housing them,” Martinez told NMI’s Heath Haussamen last year. She said inmates have the time and incentive to learn and should be given the opportunity.

“Many of these folks don’t even know how to get a bank account or how to go get a driver’s license, just the basic skills of every day life,” she said. “Many times they grew up without those skills. No one taught them.”

Tia Bland, spokeswoman for the state Corrections Department, has said that the department has already begun a focus on starting re-integrating offenders early.

“The minute they walk in the door, we start really assessing what their needs are and start working on that,” Bland told Haussamen last year. For example, if an inmate is 15-30 credits from completing an associates degree, “then we want to get them working on that.”

The task force also recommended enhancing domestic violence programs available to inmates to address New Mexico’s rampant problem with such abuse. The thinking is if offenders know how to handle their anger, it may reduce the number of abusers who wind up behind bars because of domestic situations.

Removing obstacles to gainful employment

Making jobs easier for offenders to get once they are released is also attracting some attention.

The prison reform task force suggested last year that the state should consider tax incentives for employers who hire those with criminal convictions.

It’s unclear whether any measures that sought to institute such tax incentives went before the Legislature this year. But legislation that tried a different approach died in committee.

Called the “ban the box” bill, the legislation would have prohibited the info box about felony convictions on a job application form used by state agencies, municipalities and other public entities. It likely will return for the session next year, Szczepanski says.

New Mexico has an opportunity

Richardson’s push for reform comes at a time when New Mexico’s prison population is holding constant after shrinking by nearly 400 prisoners since August 2006. The number of offenders behind bars hovers around 6,400, down from a high of 6,887 offenders in August 2006, a corrections spokeswoman said.

In fact, prison officials canceled contracts last year meant to help house state prisoners because there’s space in the state prisons where none was a few years ago.

The new prison in Clayton, meanwhile, had been billed as a way to ease overcrowding in other facilities, but on a recent day the facility had  in 557 inmates in its 626 beds.

Bland said via e-mail that how quickly Clayton fills up “depends on our rate of population growth.”

The space in New Mexico’s prisons means the state doesn’t have its back against a wall, and has some room to maneuver, as it considers what reforms to adopt, advocates say.

“We’re not in a crisis,” Marc Donatelli, a Santa Fe attorney who sat on Richardson’s prison reform task force, said last year. “Now is the time to implement prison reform.”