May 7, 2004

The United States Conference of Mayors launched its Mayors Center for Faith Based and Community Initiatives on April 28th in Philadelphia. Philadelphia Mayor John Street, Chair of the Conference of Mayors Faith-Based Community Initiatives Task Force, welcomed the mayors and Faith-Based Liaisons from all regions to bring their best practices — to learn, to share, and compare. Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley assisted Mayor Street in Chairing the Philadelphia meeting. Mayors C. Jack Ellis of Macon (GA), Willie W. Herenton of Memphis (TN), Wayne Smith of Irvington (NJ), Harvey Johnson, Jr. of Jackson (MS), and Anthony A. Williams of Washington (DC) were active participants in the meeting.

Over two hundred cities now have mayoral appointed faith-based liaisons. This fact confirms that mayors over the past few years are bringing the faith-based community closer to city halls around the country for the purpose of supporting the faith-based and community initiatives that are making a difference. By formally establishing a faith-based liaison, mayors are providing an opportunity for millions of citizens active in faith-based institutions to volunteer and provide resources on a number of challenges facing our people who reside in the metropolitan areas of our nation.

While there had been discussion and activities about faith-based liaisons, it was President Bush who pushed the issue forward. Many faith-based local partnerships were well established before President Bush came to our 69th Annual Meeting in Detroit in June of 2001 to announce to us that we should work to partner with faith-based groups. When the Presidents throughout history use the White House bully pulpit to push an issue, it helps. President Bush reiterated his commitment to this issue when he addressed our Winter Meeting in Washington in January.

Because of the partisan atmosphere we find ourselves in, this issue is one of those that has been thrown into the political arena. We need to understand that the faith-based communities are alive and working to serve people of all faiths in our cities. That activity will continue after President Bush has served his time as our President. The faith-based community is and will be a political, economic and social force in our cities. As an organization, we must have within our U.S. Conference of Mayors places of real activity that mirror the cities of the USA. And that is why we have established our Faith Based Community Initiatives Task Force. It is the bipartisan political culture of our organization to take huge issues and define what mayors within the Conference of Mayors want to do about it. And in Philadelphia last week, Program Director Nicole Maharaj, working with me, Conference staff, mayors, key city faith-based liaisons brought the issue of reentry and reintegration of 860,000 ex-offenders returning to cities up front and center for discussion and action.

On the first day of the Philadelphia meeting, Maharaj and I met in a closed meeting to learn from one another what cities are doing and to solidify some recommendations and requests made in an earlier meeting in Baltimore. It was a most productive meeting. The city liaisons want us to continue to work with them, giving them, along with their mayors, the opportunity through the Conference to strengthen their resources and activities.

In the afternoon before our mayors' meeting, we heard from the Reverend Doctor Wilson A. Goode, Sr., a former mayor of Philadelphia. Goode was very active with us during his time as mayor in the 1980s. Today he is doing an exemplary job in heading up the Amachi Program. The word amachi means, "Who knows what will come of this child." Amachi focuses on the children of parents who are incarcerated.

Mayor Wilson Goode, Sr. does not speak in generalities and platitudes. He comes forth with a staccato style of speaking riveting us with facts and facts alone. His anecdotes and reports of human beings not incarcerated, the children of those in prison, and how they are affected by their parents among the millions that are incarcerated. Mayor Goode reports that there are 7.3 million children with parents in jail or on parole. That is 10 percent of all USA children today. And he says 5 million of those children will end up in jail.

He tells a story of a grandfather, a father, a son, and a grandson who had never met. They all met in prison. The grandson told Goode "I, too, have a son I have not seen and I guess I-ll see him soon in jail." Chances are good that the grandson's sad prediction about his son will prove true because of the 7.3 children today with parents in jail or on parole, 5 million will end up in jail. That's five generations of males in prison.

Goode talks about the Prison Industrial Complex. We remember our very popular Five'star General President Eisenhower in his 1960 farewell address to the nation referring to warning us about the Military Industrial Complex. Today those persons like Goode and others devoting their lives to the reentry and reintegration of ex-offenders refer to America's Prison Industrial Complex. Those persons now profiting, making money in our nation off of the millions of Americans now incarcerated, are surveying our grade schools in urban America. They look at the number of minority children in the 4th grade of our schools to determine how many prison cells we will need to incarcerate our children at a certain age. The statistics are needed in order for the business of the prison industrial complex to continue to meet the needs handed down by our USA judicial system due to the mandatory sentencing requirements passed by USA legislative bodies.

Throughout the history of the United States Conference of Mayors, our bipartisan organization of mayors have forced this great nation to overcome outright denial on a number of economic and social challenges. When other elected officials did not wade into turbulent political waters, mayors have stood up and demanded that our great nation take a hard look at what we are doing with people — all people. Today, we are raising the reentry and reintegration issue of ex-offenders question. And asking that at least we understand the social and economic costs of incarceration and reentry. In Philadelphia we learned that it costs $27,000 a year to keep a man and woman in jail. Some experts and some faith-based leaders in Philadelphia last week are raising other alternatives to total incarceration — controlled services, etc.

In her recent book now in bookstores, Life On The Outside - The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett, Jennifer Gonnerman writes, "In America's cities, former prisoners are everywhere. Seated across from you on the subway. Pushing the cart next to yours in the supermarket. Standing behind you in line at the movies. It is impossible to pick out these ex-prisoners, of course. Once they are no longer required to wear cotton jumpsuits or ID cards pinned to their chests, they look just like everybody else.

The reality is inescapable: America has become a nation of ex-cons. Thirteen million people have been convicted of a felony and spent some time locked up. That's almost 7 percent of U.S. adult residents. If all of these people were placed on an island together, that island would have a population larger than many countries, including Sweden, Bolivia, Senegal, Greece, or Somalia.

In some ways, America's transformation into a nation of ex- cons is not surprising. In the 1970s and 1980s, a nationwide "war on drugs," combined with tougher sentencing polices, laid the groundwork for an unprecedented prison boom. Since 1970, the number of people in U.S. prisons has grown more than six-fold. In 2002, the nation's jail and prison population exceeded two million for the first time.

There is another side to this prison boom story that few people have wanted to talk about: Almost everybody who goes to prison eventually comes home. The same legislators who called for tough-on-crime laws rarely considered the long-term consequences of locking up so many people. And so, as America's prison population ballooned, there were few preparations made for the day when nearly all these prisoners would be set free.

Our nation's prisons now release more than 600,000 people a year. That's more than the entire population of Boston, Seattle, or Washington (DC). And this number continues to grow, fueling an invisible exodus: men and women leaving their prisons and moving back to the places where they once lived.

Most prisoners come from urban areas, and most return to the same neighborhoods they left. Thirty thousand prisoners return to Los Angeles County every year. Twenty thousand return to New York City. Fifteen thousand go back to Chicago. Within these cities, ex-prisoners are usually concentrated in just a few neighborhoods, places like the South Side of Chicago or Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Men and women come back from prison as changed people. They carry scars, visible and invisible, from their years behind bars. Some come home with HIV or Hepatitis C or tuberculosis. They have new friends, new enemies, maybe a new gang affiliation. All the frustration and rage that has built up inside them while they were locked up comes home with them, too.

In prison, they may have kicked an addiction, or they may have picked up a drug habit they-d never had before. They may have acquired a new resolve to abandon their criminal ways and turn their lives around. Or they may have learned from other prisoners how to become a better criminal — a more skilled car thief or dope dealer or gunrunner.

Most ex-prisoners have no money, few job skills, little education, and a history of addiction. An estimated 16 percent suffer from a serious mental illness. With little or no assistance, these men and women are expected to rebuild their lives and stay out of prison. Not surprisingly, the odds of success are slim: Forty percent of people released from prison are back behind bars within three years because of new crime or a parole violation.

Eighty percent of people leaving prison are supervised by parole officers. In many ways, parole functions as a sort of invisible prison. Parolees cannot get high, skip appointments with their officers, stay out past curfew, socialize with other felons, or leave town without permission. Any violation of these or many other rules could earn them a trip back to jail.

Even for ex-prisoners who stay out of trouble and get off parole, their punishment does not end. Today a felony record functions like an invisible scarlet letter, ensuring that former inmates are treated as outcasts whose debt to society can never be fully repaid. By law, former prisoners in some states may be denied public housing, student loans, a driver's license, parental rights, welfare benefits, certain types of jobs, as well as the right to vote.

These myriad restrictions have transformed America into a two-tier society, in which millions of ostensibly free people are prohibited from sharing rights and privileges enjoyed by everybody else. The division between these two worlds falls along lines of race and ethnicity. Nearly two-thirds of people leaving prison are African American or Hispanic.

Nowadays, almost every criminal-justice dollar is spent on locking people in prisons and keeping them there — and very little is spent on transforming them back into civilians. Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice did allot $100 million to state prison agencies to prepare inmates for their release. This is a marked change from the past, but it is still a minuscule amount compared to the $55 billion spent annually on the entire prison system.

In the last few years, the phenomenon of people leaving prison has become a popular top in academic and criminal justice circles, where it is referred to as "reentry." Experts debate the subject at national conferences; trade journals publish papers on it. These public discussions usually leave out the voices of former prisoners, relying instead on statistics. But the true story of America's exodus of ex-cons cannot be told only with numbers.

Coming home from prison is about learning to control your temper without using your fists. It's about finding a place to sleep. It's about remembering how to feed yourself. It's about accumulating a wardrobe. It's about rediscovering the opposite sex. It's about finding a way, legal or illegal, to make money. It's about trying to earn respect from the children you abandoned.

The question is what is our role; what are our recommendations. The mayoral discussion started in Philadelphia last week. Some cities and their faith-based community are exemplary in their reentry efforts and we heard and learned from them. We will continue this discussion in Boston next month as we convene for our 72nd Annual Meeting. With the help of our mayors along with their appointed faith-based liaisons, we will continue to learn, share and decide exactly what mayors can do to get our nation out of denial and into accepting the reality which to us is really inescapable.

Mayors and faith-based local leaders through our Mayors Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives will continue to work toward an active set of goals — a strategic plan — to met the reentry challenge. We have no choice.