Recidivism Mitigation: What even IS that?

Osu! I want to talk about recividism, that is, whether a prisoner, once freed, will stay out of prison for another term.

Let's set the environment up.

Why is prison important?

In theory, imprisoning someone for committing a crime is meant to deliver a punishment and an opportunity to rehabilitate through some means.
This keeps the offender as a captive audience, removes outside obligations, and allows them a chance to better themselves, steering them away from the influences that led to their criminality.
Sounds really nice on paper, right?

Imprisonment in practice in America

Mind, of course, that my view has a Florida bias.
The exact opposite happens: little to nothing is done to rehabilitate the offender. We spend our days layabout, watching "2 Broke Girls", "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch", and the same televised movie for the 99th time. Religion becomes the only option for some to have a change of daily pace, because they are arbitrarily barred from other options.

How prisons fail offenders

Prisons here are dense! Denser than my old high school, which was the smallest in the county at that time! My facility has ~1800 inmates, which I just learned. It just looks small when you're on the ground here with controlled movement.
That means you need a lot of educators for various things, but you also need a lot of ROOM for education. You have to ensure that gang members aren't attending a mixer to share info and drugs, or trying to gain entry to a class so they can finish a job that saw them become a captive audience member.
You have to allow for different modalities of learning: language barriers, disability accommodations as prime examples. That room doesn't exist without a larger campus, and larger means even more staff to handle inmates.

Problems exist.

There's a problem, of course. The loop of prison to streets is a loop, not a straight road. People end up right back in prison. They spend years in, fall behind their contemporaries, get out with no appreciable skill increase, and return to (or in some cases, turn to) a life of crime in order to survive.
Or, they get popped for a technical violation because they have a conditional release, like making their "probation" payment ten minutes late (literal in one man's case) -- welcome back to prison, population: you.

This keeps the population high in the system, meaning there is little to no room for everyone here. In this COVID-19 age, we bunk in open dorms less than 102 cm (~40") apart in any direction. There are more and more coming into the system every day. Florida has National Guard working the prisons to overcome a severe staff shortage, to boot.

Failure examination

Since falling, I have spoken to many inmates that have taken the time to get past my quiet manner, my left coast accent, my preference to enunciate, and my hearing disability, and a lot of what I have heard repeats. It resonates with the mallet strike of prison fails individuals, and sets them up for return.

Names changed because I can't go and ask these folks for permission to name them even in part; the stories have clear identifiers removed to protect them, but their stories have a point.

Geoffrey

This older man is in his 60s, and has been in prison 9 times, according to his ID card. He tells me, when he was last out (we arrived the same day), he struggled with how computerized everything is. He doesn't know much about computers, smartphones, the internet... and they're just about requirements to live in our modern society.
So he returned again to his life of crime, just to get by.

Giuseppe

This young man is barely in his 30s. He was eking out an existence working in a diner when he fell. He didn't have any skills beyond that; didn't even graduate high school, and told me he is worried about what happens when he gets out as technology might make his role obsolete in a decade's time -- before his tentative release date.

Keef

This older man in his 60s had been homeless before being given a temporary home and medical coverage in the Florida State Prison system. He should be going homeless again real soon now, but he doesn't know computers, and has a disability that makes it hard for him to hold things in his hands. Getting a place to stay was impossible before his imprisonment, and he worries it will only be worse with a conviction.
He just wants a quiet place that's safe, maybe to enjoy an occasional jazz cigarette, and to know he isn't staring down the spectre of living behind a gas station again.

What can be done?

So much! Now, fair as fair, FLDOC does offer a GED program, of which Giuseppe would benefit. I told him as such. There are facilities that offer tradeskills/vocations; ask about them, I explained, and stay away from negative influences.

My irritation is that it is nearly impossible at the time of writing for inmates to get into anything of that nature, at least here.

Some of what could be educational and potentially turned into a trade could be delivered on the tablets we inmates are being issued, for those of us inclined to self-educate.

Learning a spoken language is a very useful skill, be it English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, something else. These tablets have pogo pin docking connectors: desks could be installed with matching mating pins, and a connection to the internet to learn a language via Duolingo or some other service.
Scripting languages are important, too -- build a keyboard into the desk, let us learn PHP, Python, Perl, Golang, Rust... Skills that can turn into money for us once we get out.

How about Geoffrey's needs? A class on general computer and smartphone usage would be beautiful for him, offered in the last 6 months before departure, so it is fresh in his mind. Computers don't have to be top of the line machines for it, either -- some older off-lease machines with Windows 10 and a Linux distro would be more than sufficient to throw fewer to the meat grinder's return chute.

How about Keef?
It is possible that, given the non-severity of his crime, they will help him find a place to stay when he is released, but whether they will help him claim disability payments or Social Security, I am not qualified to say. But following him leads me into a whole realm of subject matter about people with disabilities and how prison treats them (one word: poorly). That would be a post for another time. :)

In an ideal scenario, they would help the man get said payments, help him get housing to mitigate his return to homelessness, and make sure he has a financial institution that won't screw him right and left with fees when all he has is those subsistence payments from the government.

I can hope.

I didn't even get deep into the things we can do for physically inclined inmates, but it is to my understanding that at some of the prison camps here in Florida, they do train on things such as HVAC, auto repair, welding, and so on. I surmise waiting lists for those programs are also unnecessarily long because of the earlier mentioned issues.

I do also have to throw my own spanner into the works here:

Custody levels

Inmates have a custody level, which determines a lot of things, including whether they are allowed to be around free worlders (like you, dear reader). Maximum security inmates aren't likely to ever leave the Mushroomery alive, unless a miracle of miracles happens: this is only assigned to inmates on death row in this state.
There's also Close (next highest), Medium, Minimum, and Community Custody.
High custody levels can prevent free worlders from coming in to teach, depending on the kind of work being done. Camp psych levels also come into play, for the safety of the free worlder. After all, can't teach some aspects of woodworking to someone who might have an episode, trying to mash someone's face into a router -- the tool enables damage that could be fatal if the right confluence of events happens.
This complicates rehabilitation efforts, much to my chagrin.

What do we do, then?

Prison reform starts before prison, but needs to continue behind the concertina wire.
America has a program, Job Corps, which teaches a vocation at no cost to the student, but is age bracketed: 16 to 24. How many people are aware this exists at no cost to their young American? Not enough, I wager. I found out about it entirely by chance when I was 20 and struggling to find a job better than slinging meat on a grill at a fast foodery.
Talk this program up!

There are affordably priced schooling options, such as the University of the People, where one can get a degree in several fields. Our social net programs should be supportive of people trying to achieve higher education, not punishing them.

Restore the missing middle. Housing is painfully expensive out there, because we've shut the middle class out of housing. They're stuck competing for low income housing with those with low incomes.
How much impact would affordable housing have on mitigating situations that lead people to crime for survival? Self answering question.

For those of us who are then behind the wire, working out the grand puzzles of how to safely educate tens of thousands of inmates with different custody levels is the $64,000 question.

Distance education could work with hardware and connectivity, but hardware implies expense. Getting them to see us as a valid expense item may be tricky from the inside.

Parting words

If you know a loved one behind the wires, a big favor you can do for many is pay attention to your local and state governments, see what they are doing for and to your local communities, as well as what they are doing for prison reform by name.

Write us when you can. We otherwise have nothing to look forward to, and it might make some of us backslide when we want to move forward.

Be supportive. Our punishment is being behind the wire; we need support, not shaming.

Thanks for reading. Take care!