Everybody Loves a Winner, Indeed

“Everybody loves a winner,” sang Linda Ronstadt on her 1973 album Don’t Cry Now.“ But when you lose,” she added, “you lose alone.”

One might add: especially in America.

A current case in point came Sunday night, during the Super Bowl post-game ceremony. After the game ended, and we all came back from commercial break, the public address announcer at Lucas Oil Field in Indianapolis introduced NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

As a long-time sports fan, I’ve watched such ceremonies many times before. What I expected was for the commish to begin by commending the losing Patriots on their effort. Only then, with the agony of defeat acknowledged and softened, would the winners be congratulated and praised.

Not so, in this case. Goodelll didn’t even mention the Patriots. He started by thanking the league’s fans for their support. This was understandable and appropriate — especially considering that the NFL season began belatedly because the owners had locked out the players in a labor dispute.

From expression of gratitude to the fans, however, Goodell didn’t make the obvious next move. That would have been to recognize the second-place Patriots for a remarkable season that ended one play short of the championship.

Goodell didn’t do that. He ignored the Pats completely and moved immediately to laud the winning Giants for their victory.

What a perverse culture we have to permit such behavior.

And, by extension, what a challenge ex-offenders have, trying to reenter society after being labeled as “losers” because they went to prison.

Moses: Ex-Offender in a Grand Narrative

Cecil B. Demille's  film The Ten Commandments is still a grand cinematic event, even on the small screen, 55 years after its first release.

To ironic, postmodern senibilities, suspicious of any attempt at "grand narrative," the film's sweeping historical claims are not sustainable. And indeed, one cannot help but detect Cold War influences in Demille's grandiose presentation.

This is especially the case, for example, when the off-screen narrator asserts in a booming, not-be-questioned voice that the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt marked the Birth of Freedom into the world. I interpret this as Demille's response to the climate of McCarthyism that pervaded the 1950s, when fears of godless communism were irrationally strong. At such a time, the Judeo-Christian tradition seemed to offered a bulwark of defense against the officially atheist Soviet Union and its competing grand narrative of Marism-Leninism.

What I was most struck by, however, as I watched the film on Saturday in Holy Week, was its depiction of the story of Moses as the story of the rehabilitation of an ex-offender. This is an aspect of Moses' weighty historical persona that is not as widely known as it should be. But it is a timely one, because ex-offender reentry is one of the major issues our society faces in this age of mass incarceration.

The Book of Exodus, Chapter 2, mentions Moses' killing of an Egyptian overseer and his flight from Pharoah's wrath into the land of Midian. In Chapter 3, God appears in the Burning Bush. After some complicated, heart-to-heart negotiations with God, Moses returns to Egypt in a new role: not the privileged prince, not the wanted felon, but spokesman for an emerging people seeking justice.

Charlton Heston, who plays Moses in an iconic role, was widely known later in life as the face of the National Rifle Assocation. But I suggest that Heston's image could be recast. His Moses is an inspiring example of an ex-offender who turned his life around and built community.

Spending a Fortune to Incarcerate, But a Pittance to Rehabilitate

The scale of the correctional Leviathan in California is truly staggering.

Joan Petersilia recites some of the round numbers in her essay in Wilson Quarterly’s recent issue on mass imprisonment. 170,000 prisoners being held, at about $50,000 per prisoner per year, leading to $10 billion in annual costs.

In some ways, however, the most disturbing figure is one that is small, not large. California spends less than $3,000 per inmate per year on rehabilitation. Only half of released inmates have participated in any type of program during their time in prison.

To be sure, prison programming cannot be expected to work miracles, especially when broad sociological trends are at work. After all, with skills at a premium in the global economy, it becomes harder and harder for low-skilled ex-offenders to get jobs.

Yet governments have added to the challenges of prisoner reentry into society by passing broad laws excluding all ex-offenders from certain fields, such as education and health care.

Understandably, no one wants a dangerous ex-felon working as a home health aide, or a convicted sex offender taking care of children. Unfortunately, though, the laws impacting ex-offender employment have not been narrowly tailored to achieve those ends.

All in all, these are ingredients in a recipe for recidivism. It should scarcely be surprising that so many people return to prison after release, either for parole violations or new crimes. It’s the well-worn path of least resistance.

3 Rs: Recidivism, Re-entry, and Reinvestment

Recidivism is usually defined, in corrections circles, as a prison inmate being rearrested for a new offense within a given period of time.

Measurement methods vary, but historically the rearrest rate has been quite high. Take, for example, the recent New York Times article on state-level efforts to help ex-inmates to find jobs upon release. The recidivism rate given there is 2 of every 3 released inmates within three years.

States have much to gain, though, by investing money in offender re-entry. As the Times piece points out, it costs about $35,000 to incarcerate someone for a year - more than it takes to send someone to the University of Michigan.

What Went Up Can Come Down

Correctional populations have gone up so steadily for so long that it had come to seem almost like a law of nature.

Over a decade ago, when the total number of people in jail or prison reached 2 million, the conservative scholar John J. Dilulio opined that this was (finally) enough. Further increases were not likely to enhance public safety and might even diminish it, as wholesale incarceration decimated the social stability of so many neighborhoods.

Yet the number of inmates continued to go up - from 2 million in jail or prison in 1999 to 2.3 million in 2009.

In several states, however, the relentless budgetary pressure wrought by the Great Recession is forcing a rethinking. Indeed, in some states the numbers are actually starting to come down.

Michigan is a case in point. On my recent trip to Grand Rapids for a board meeting of Prison Congregations of America, I learned that the statewide prison population has gone down from 51,000 to 45,0000 in a matter of months. State officials have prioritized reentry for ex-offenders (or, as one prison ministry volunteer called them, "returning citizens"). As a result, what once seemed immutable is now in a condition of rapid change.

Joshua DuBois Shakes Every Hand in St. Paul

Joshua DuBois looked out at the audience in the Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul and asked us to raise first one hand, then another — and move them from side to side. “I told Barak I’d shake every hand in St. Paul,” the 26-year-old director of the revamped office for faith-based programs within the White House said with a smile. His smile was contagious, and the ensuing applause was instantaneous.

It’s a good thing the energy was positive, because our national problems (and indeed world) problems are daunting. Someone whose job is to empower people to tackle them can be a real catalyst for solutions, and Mr. DuBois appears ready to play that role.

Krista Tippett, host of the public radio series “Speaking of Faith,” made sure to ask DuBois what prepared him for the job. He mentioned being a preacher’s kid (his stepfather is an AME minister in Nashville) who started finding his voice through a Pentecostal church in Cambridge while attending Boston University.

The church DuBois attended is called Calvary Praise and Worship Center, and it was the only congregation mentioned by name at the St. Paul event. As a preacher’s kid myself who is married to a Lutheran minister, I would have liked to hear more about the central role congregations play in forming religious identity and creating community.

Mr. DuBois spoke of being deeply moved as a college student by the unjust killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean immigrant mistakenly killed by New York City police. Though he did not tell the story himself at the St. Paul event tonight, Time magazine reported earlier this year that DuBois stood before a Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Boston for 41 continuous hours in response to the 41 bullets used to kill Mr. Diallo.

In the Obama administration, the office DuBois heads has identified four key priorities:

● Connecting community organizations as part of the president’s economic recovery plan
● Encouraging fathers to be active parents
● Reducing unintended pregnancies
● Engaging in interfaith dialog

The indirect implications of these goals for criminal justice are not difficult to see. It begins with economic recovery because it’s not only in Les Miserables that financial pressure can push people toward crime. Similarly, many people who become offenders have absent, neglectful or abusive fathers, and there are a lot of those in a country where something like forty percent of births are to unwed mothers. This, in turn, ties in with efforts to reduce unintended pregnancies, and so on.

Interfaith dialog may seem at first glance like a more amorphous notion, but it really isn’t. Obama understands, where Bush did not, that Christians do not have a privileged place in an America that is now highly pluralist. DuBois will help to get the word out that pluralist doesn’t mean relativist. As Americans, we need to come together around our shared values, regardless of our particular religious beliefs (or lack thereof). Obama’s office is therefore reaching out not only to faith groups, but also to secular nonprofits and neighborhood groups, such as the Boys and Girls Clubs.

The theme of dialog leading to productive action was also present in the one criminal justice topic that came up specifically in the conversation between DuBois and Tippett. Ms.Tippett suggested that Americans have become weary of the “culture wars” (abortion, guns and gays). DuBois responded by citing interfaith cooperation on ex-offender reentry as an example of transcendence of the old religious divides.

Tens of thousands of ex-offenders are released every year, often with not much more than the proverbial bus ticket to fall back on. One doesn't need to be a card-carrying Christian, or even a person of religious faith at all, to realize that they need housing, shelter, and employment. Each of us has a role to play in creating communities where those things will be available. Without them, recidivism (repeat offending) is an all-too-common outcome.