Welcome to America, where 2.3 million people are locked up, and each year 600,000 of those individuals will be coming home, often to communities near you. For the most part, they will leave prison uneducated, unskilled, unprepared, and angry at having spent years locked away in a warehouse. This is the legacy of the law-and-order movement and the prison boom of the 1990s: America is in the midst of an incarceration and post incarceration crisis.
This series of diary entries will:
(1) focus on the roots of this crisis
(2) argue that the current environment makes reform of American correctional policy more possible than it has been in years
(3) explain the need for federal involvement re state correctional policies
(4) explain how strategies related to building human capital and employability of incarcerated individuals can help remedy the current situation
(5) explain why federal efforts on employment of ex-offenders have failed and
(6) propose a series of national reforms
Link to Part I
PART II: Employment & the Post Incarceration Crisis
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