S.C. Legislature should place focus on prisoner rehabilitation

In a June 13 article titled "Legislators gang up on crime with new laws" in The Post and Courier, there was a list of proposed lock-'em-up bills that state legislators' consider answers to the violent crime rate in South Carolina.

While the League of Women Voters of South Carolina decries violent crime and supports penalties for those who commit it, the LWVSC also believes the General Assembly's focus is much too narrow. New, realistic legislation in other states such as California and Washington is directed toward preventing crime by keeping people out of prison a second time. We believe South Carolina legislators ought to look into these best practices in those and other states before calling their job done.

South Carolina has 55,242 people incarcerated, on probation or on parole on an average day. This is an incarceration rate of 539 state inmates per 100,000 residents and is ranked eighth in the nation.

The public expects prisoners who have served their time to return to society as law-abiding, taxpaying citizens. However, within three years of release, at least a third of former prisoners are re-arrested. Clearly, something is not being accomplished by punishment-focused prison policies.

The League of Women Voters wants all inmates to be required to participate in programs that prepare them for release, and we want those programs to be available in every South Carolina prison and jail. These programs include, at a minimum, mental and physical evaluations, GED classes, job training, anger management, domestic violence treatment, and alcohol and drug treatment. It is no excuse for the state to say that inmates refuse to participate in the few programs that do exist. Inmates are incarcerated and fully under state control. It is no excuse for the state to say programs cost too much. Building new prisons costs much more.

Post-incarceration, prisoner re-entry programs also are critical in curbing recidivism. It is a betrayal of public trust for the General Assembly to do little or nothing in this respect.

Our present system requires that probationers or parolees comply with many of the limited programs listed above at their own expense. Failure to do so subjects them to further prison time. In fact, most prisoners simply do not have the money or skills to comply.

While some South Carolina prisons do offer limited programs, the corrections system operates at such a low funding level that state prisons director Jon Ozmint says great effort is required for the prison system to simply stay afloat. South Carolina is among the bottom three in the nation in per-inmate funding, and it is the only correctional system in the nation funded below 1999 levels.

Especially underfunded is adequate addiction treatment for every inmate who needs it. This is particularly serious, since alcohol and drug use contribute enormously to the reasons why people go to prison in the first place.

It will take legislative action, or even judicial sentencing, to force the availability of adequate prisoner rehabilitation in South Carolina's prisons and jails. It will certainly require additional funding. In any event, nearly all prisoners not given the death penalty or life without parole will one day return to our communities. It is clearly a matter of public security that released prisoners do not return to crime.

We believe it is the General Assembly's responsibility to give all inmates the tools to be meaningfully rehabilitated and require that all inmates participate. Simply locking up more people for longer sentences just prolongs the current policy of doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

Lucretia Pressley

Criminal Justice Chair

League of Women Voters of S.C.

367 Nesmith Corner

Nesmith

Barbara Zia

President-Elect

League of Women Voters of S.C.

231 South Plaza Court

Mount Pleasant