When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) [Hardcover]

Joan Petersilia (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 019516086X | ISBN-13: 978-0195160864 | Publication Date: March 20, 2003

Every year, hundreds of thousands of jailed Americans leave prison and return to society. Largely uneducated, unskilled, often without family support, and with the stigma of a prison record hanging over them, many if not most will experience serious social and psychological problems after release. Fewer than one in three prisoners receive substance abuse or mental health treatment while incarcerated, and each year fewer and fewer participate in the dwindling number of vocational or educational pre-release programs, leaving many all but unemployable. Not surprisingly, the great majority is rearrested, most within six months of their release. What happens when all those sent down the river come back up--and out?

As long as there have been prisons, society has struggled with how best to help prisoners reintegrate once released. But the current situation is unprecedented. As a result of the quadrupling of the American prison population in the last quarter century, the number of returning offenders dwarfs anything in America's history. What happens when a large percentage of inner-city men, mostly Black and Hispanic, are regularly extracted, imprisoned, and then returned a few years later in worse shape and with dimmer prospects than when they committed the crime resulting in their imprisonment? What toll does this constant "churning" exact on a community? And what do these trends portend for public safety? A crisis looms, and the criminal justice and social welfare system is wholly unprepared to confront it.

Drawing on dozens of interviews with inmates, former prisoners, and prison officials, Joan Petersilia convincingly shows us how the current system is failing, and failing badly. Unwilling merely to sound the alarm, Petersilia explores the harsh realities of prisoner reentry and offers specific solutions to prepare inmates for release, reduce recidivism, and restore them to full citizenship, while never losing sight of the demands of public safety.

As the number of ex-convicts in America continues to grow, their systemic marginalization threatens the very society their imprisonment was meant to protect. America spent the last decade debating who should go to prison and for how long. Now it's time to decide what to do when prisoners come home.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In When Prisoners Come Home, Petersilia exposes her investigative and policy background to good effect....Petersilia's arguments--plainly stated and soundly grounded in the empirical evidence on program failures and successes--provide an aggressive agenda for practices that could meaningfully change the way criminal justice is implemented in the United States."--Community Corrections Report

"When Prisoners Come Home sets the stage for reinventing the offender pre-release planning and discharge process. Dr. Petersilia's insight is nothing less than inspiring." --Reginald Wilkinson, Former President, American Correctional Association

"Joan Petersilia has brilliantly mapped the terrain of prisoner reentry, mixing forgotten wisdom, new data and fresh insights into a compelling call for new approaches to the reintegration of returning prisoners."--Jeremy Travis, Senior Fellow, The Urban Institute

"Nationally recognized criminology scholar Petersilia has provided a benchmark text portraying the pressing societal and criminal justice policy crisis of a record number of prisoners returning to communities.... A must-read for every American."--CHOICE

"Prisoner reentry has emerged as the most important new issue in justice policy. When Prisoners Come Home is the best, most comprehensive source of material on reentry that exists anywhere."--Todd R. Clear, Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

"When Prisoners Come Home is scholarship at its highest practical level. With about 600,000 prisoners being released each year, governments are planning massive and expensive efforts to deal with the avalanche. Dr. Petersilia's book is a necessary ally in that formidable task. To add to its attraction, it is crisply and clearly written - scholarship infused by practical experience and presented without pretension. For many decades it will dominate the literature on parole and the conditions of prisoners returning to society."--the late Norval Morris, Julius Kreeger Professor of Law & Criminology, Emeritus, University of Chicago

"Over 95 percent of our state and federal prison inmates will be released, most only a few years after they began their incarceration. Joan Petersilia's lucid book gives us the best scientific guidance on how to maximize, cost-effectively, the prospects that after they get out, they will finally become law abiding."--Daniel Glaser, Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California, Past President, American Society of Criminology

"A lucid, comprehensive and scholarly accounting of reentry. This publication will serve as the premier text on reentry for many years to come. Petersilia's book presents a striking and rigorous synthesis of what is known (and not known) in the reentry literature. Her bibliography offers an encyclopedic review of the literature."--Chief Edward E. Rhine, Office of Offender Reentry and Correctional Best Practices, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction

About the Author

Joan Petersilia is Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. The author of numerous books and a former president of the American Society of Criminology, she is a consultant to the United States Department of Justice and to many state and local agencies.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (March 20, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019516086X
• ISBN-13: 978-0195160864
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #305,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great! Practical book for all interested in criminal justice, March 14, 2003

By 

Darcy Purvis (Riverside, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) (Hardcover)

This book deals with the most important topic of the coming decade for the criminal justice system: what to do when all of the massive numbers of criminals we have sent to prison come home. Petersilia not only describes all of the legal and practical hurdles criminals face when they begin reintegration, but she identifies how we can actually help them return to the community. This book is an easy read with an invaluable compilation of the latest statistics and summary of the challenges of life after incarceration.
Petersilia has written an academic piece with both theoretical and policy influence. It is a must read for criminologists, but most importantly for all practitioners in the criminal justice system from police and prosecution to corrections and parole. For students, the book provides a necessary education of the implications of recent law and public policy.
This is an excellent text for all of those interested in the criminal justice system. Petersilia succinctly describes what we have done wrong, then she provides recommendations for the future.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's about time!, March 14, 2003

By 

James Mowrey (Azle, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) (Hardcover)

In "When Prisoners Come Home," Petersilia not only describes parole and reentry, but also the impact the war on drugs has had on young people. In short: too many people to prison, too many prisoner returns, and in the end--too many lost lives. The author also outlines the impact of a number of unintended consequences for families, communities, and children of the prisoners coming home.

There hasn't been a book written on parole in over 30 years. This is a much needed publication and should be read by anyone interested in corrections and sentencing policy. However, anyone with even a casual interest in current correction's issues will find this book engaging, interesting, and easy to read.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When Prisoners Come Home, March 13, 2003

By 

Valerie Jenness (Irvine, California United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) (Hardcover)

When Prisoners Come Home draws on both qualitative and quantitative data to critically examine the "prisoner reentry problem," a timely and important social problem. As Petersilia explains, "we spent the last decade debating who should go to prison, for how long, and how we might pay for it, and we paid virtually no attention to how we would cope with prisoners after they left prison" (p. 14). This book, then, begins with the fact that "never before in U.S. history have so many individuals been released from prison." To quote the numbers provided by Petersilia, "95% of the 1.4 million prisons inmates now in prison will eventually be released and will return to communities-635,000 people in 2002 and at least that many in future years" (p. 1). As detailed in When Prisoners Come Home, prisoners remain largely uneducated and unskilled and usually lack solid family supports. Moreover, about three quarters of all prisoners have substance abuse problems and one in six suffers from mental illness. These facts, coupled with an increasingly punitive public sentiment and political rhetoric about prisoners and diminishing resources devoted to rehabilitation, ensure that problems abound.

When Prisoners Come Home assembles empirical evidence to describe and assess the prisoner reentry problem. Conceptualizing "prisoner reentry" as "all activities and programming conducted to prepare ex-convicts to return safely to the community and to live as law abiding citizens" (p. 3), Petersilia devotes specific chapters to skillfully examining the characteristics of U.S. returning prisoners, reviewing historical and current parole release and supervision practices, assessing of what is known about the
effectiveness of prisoner reentry programs, and summarizing parolee recidivism and its contribution to crime in America. Moreover, she masterfully details how we help prisoners through rehabilitation, how we hinder reintegration through various legal and practical barriers, and how victims do and do not play a role in the larger process of prisoner reentry. Finally, and most importantly, in the final chapter Petersilia offers twelve empirically justified recommendations on how to improve prisoner reentry.

Combined, these chapters set the stage for Petersilia's most compelling observation, which is made in the final chapter:
Having made this detailed analysis of parole and prisoner reentry in the United States, one must conclude that we could not have designed a more ineffective system had we set out to do so. For most offenders, corrections does not correct. Indeed the conditions under which many inmates are handled are detrimental to successful reintegration, and many of the restrictions we place on returning prisons prove deeply counterproductive.
For Petersilia, "the irony is that more punitive crime control policies, particularly ones that rely heavily on prisons, contribute further to the declines in social support that produced crime in the first place" (p. 245). Thus the reentry problem is not only emerging as a key policy issue because of its relationship to crime, but because of its social, political, and economic consequences to entire communities.