Inmate Inrush Worries D.C. Officials City Lacks Services to Aid 2,500 Ex-Offenders, Administrators Tell House Panel

By Arthur Santana Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, July 21, 2001; Page B01

More than 2,500 prisoners from the District will be released over the next 12 months, and the city is ill-equipped to deal with their return, officials said yesterday at a subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill.

The number of prisoners being released nationwide also will increase next year and in future years, according to corrections officials. They said the trend is due in part to tough sentencing guidelines enacted in the 1980s and early 1990s, explaining that many of the offenders who received prison sentences during those years will soon have finished serving their time.

The District faces a particularly difficult challenge in reintegrating convicted felons because its ex-offenders have unusually high rates of recidivism and substance abuse, according to officials who testified at the hearing held before the House Government Reform subcommittee on the District.

"[The District's] prisoners are nearly twice as likely as the national average to have prior convictions, and they are more likely to have serious drug and medical problems," said Rep. Constance A. Morella (R-Md.), the subcommittee chairman.

"What can be done to prevent recidivism, to buck the odds that show that as many as two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested within three years?" she said.

The city also has a shortage of 250 halfway house beds, officials noted.

At least 40 percent of D.C. offenders leaving the prison system have no home and are especially susceptible to committing crimes if halfway house beds are unavailable, according to Jasper Ormond, interim director of the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, the federal agency that has handled services for returning D.C. prisoners since 1997.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), ranking member of the subcommittee, warned that the city might face a crime problem as serious as the one it experienced in the late 1980s if a plan is not created soon to overcome residents' opposition to opening halfway houses in their neighborhoods.

Said Morella: "I think there has to be a public education effort here . . . to drive home the fact that these prisoners are coming back to the community regardless, and if they're not entering a halfway house, then they are likely heading right back to the streets and the lifestyle they practiced before being incarcerated."

Ormond's agency provides services that include substance abuse testing and treatment, lifestyle counseling and job referral. He said studies have shown that a well-monitored stay of 120 days at a halfway house reduces recidivism. Yet as many as one-third of released D.C. inmates who need this regimen are staying in halfway houses for much shorter periods because of the lack of beds, he said.

Currently, there are about a dozen halfway houses in the city with a total of about 557 beds, said Margret Nedelkoff Kellems, deputy D.C. mayor for public safety and justice.

The lack of beds in halfway houses and other kinds of transitional facilities is one of the first things D.C. officials must address in anticipation of the ex-prisoners' return, Kellems said. "The administration is currently in the process of developing a facility inventory, which will help facilitate siting decisions," she said.

"In the areas of increasing access to housing and securing employment . . . we have more work to do," Kellems said, adding that she will meet with Ormond's agency and the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments next week to discuss the issue.

Norton said the city should organize an emergency transition group to assure services for ex-offenders rather than have them released into the community without treatment and monitoring.

She said she was surprised that the District had not devised a plan in anticipation of the increase in returning prisoners.

Morella said that "right now . . . there is not a lot of data that local officials can use to help them" determine how best to reintegrate the prison population into the community.

-- Anonymous, July 21, 2001