By Jon Marc Taylor

It was recently reported that faced with overcrowded penitentiaries, the British government decided instead of spending hundreds-of-millions of pounds building more prisons, it would grant early release to 25,500 prisoners. Since that would take away the prisoners’ "free housing," the government would provide transition expenses for "room and board" with which to live until their terms expired.

In America, the largest numerical and per capita incarcerator in the world, this announcement was labeled "Weird News."

My question is why?

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It is obvious that people who leave prison without jobs or places to live are unlikely to stay out of jail for long. The lack of such support is a major reason two-thirds of parolees are rearrested.

In America, though, instead of providing affective preparatory or transitional assistance, substance addicted felons are barred for life from temporary welfare assistance. In Missouri, moreover, the governor line item vetoed the salaries for prison drug abuse counselors from the latest budget. Despite high recidivism rates, this veto cut more than half the treatment resources.

A decade ago, Congress obtusely expelled prisoners from the Pell Grant program, resulting in the closure of numerous prison college programs across the country. All the while, everyone acknowledged that such training is the most effective and efficient rehabilitative opportunity, with paroled graduates having the highest employment and lowest recidivism rates for all released offenders.

In the Show-Me State, not only were multiple college programs closed with the loss of the federal funding, but also less than 2% of the current correction budget supported essential education. Even more distressingly, two years ago, the minimal GED programs in three of the state’s largest prisons were shuttered as well, erasing hope for any education.

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A study published in the "New England Journal of Medicine," reports of the U.S. justice system is doing an inadequate job easing the transition of released offenders. During the first two weeks of freedom, for every major cause, the risk of death for ex-convicts is nearly 13 times that of the general population.

University of California at Irvine criminologist, Joan Petersilia, comments that this "highlights the critical period immediately following release, which corrections policy has not yet really focused on."

The death rates are a reflection of the poor, uneducated, and unhealthy prisoner population in general. More than seventy percent of those released have been diagnosed with drug and alcohol dependence, with the majority not receiving treatment while imprisoned.

Explaining the extreme spike in death rates, Dr. Clarissa Krinsky of the University of New Mexico Health Center, observes that release from incarceration "is a time of enormous social stressors. You’re suddenly without a home, without a job."

Dr. Jacqueline Tulasky, a professor of clinical medicine at UC San Francisco, who studied the transition from prison to freedom, comments that lives could be saved by offering drug treatment, transitional housing, and other services to newly released ex-convicts.

In Missouri, on the other hand, parolees are released immediately owing a monthly sixty dollar supervision fee, and indebted for tens if not hundreds-of-thousands of dollars for incarceration reimbursement expenses. So with little economically viable education, untreated substance abuse dependencies, being legally barred from numerous occupations, haphazard to sparse transitional support, and the burden of crushing debt, it’s of little surprise so many fail to "adjust" to freedom.

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America spends sixty billion annually to incarcerate more than two million souls, releasing six-hundred-thousand a year only to have two-thirds of them recidivate. America continues to incarcerate at one time or another the sixteen-million strong caste of felons and ex-felons, while the rest of the world crazily seeks ways to reduce crime and save lives through prevention and transition policies.

In America we obviously know better. We divert limited public resources to build ever more prisons instead of using that money to lower college tuition rates and provide health care for the uninsured.

Now that is weird!

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