Halfway House Re-evaluation
During the last three decades, the number of people incarcerated in the United States has more than quadrupled. The enormous surge in the inmate population has led to an increase in the number of criminals returning to their communities and the vast majority struggle with reintegration challenges (U.S. Department of Justice, 201). In addition to the problems of stigma, prejudice, and social exclusion, financial pressure becomes their biggest issue, which begins as soon as the offender is released from jail and can persist for a very long time in his life.
For starters, the outstanding financial obligations are crippling. On average, people leave prison with more than $13,000 in criminal justice debt, made up of unpaid fines and fees owed to the courts and prison system. In addition, formerly incarcerated people face several barriers to finding employment due to low levels of educational attainment and work experience, health problems, and the criminal record that enables employer discrimination. For example, 40 percent of state and federal prisoners have neither a high school diploma nor GED, nearly a third have a physical impairment or mental condition (Petersilia 2005). These barriers make it nearly impossible for formerly incarcerated people to establish a foothold as they seek to restart their lives and without that foothold to support themselves and their potential families (per se they have kids), these individuals are at risk of recidivism, inflicting distress on their families and great cost to the larger public.
Programs that aid ex-offenders in reentering society have therefore attracted a lot of interest. Halfway houses, for example, are centers where those with criminal histories can learn essential skills to help them reintegrate into society to better support and care for themselves as a part of their parole. According to the article Halfway Out: An Examination of the Effects of Halfway Houses on Criminal Recidivism, “As well as serving as a residence, halfway houses provide social, medical, psychiatric, educational, and other services to equip the residents with up-to-date knowledge and mental health……”, halfway houses are unique surroundings that offer offenders a chance to network, learn either positive or negative values and make important social bonds, which may develop resources helpful to get employed. Unlike the conditions that define most parolees’ circumstances, halfway house residents are under an intensive form of supervision, which aims to counteract criminogenic risk factors like unemployment, homelessness, and substance use to minimize their chance of recidivism. As a result, involvement in halfway houses is meant to not only help offenders make a successful transition back into society but also to foster the possibility of long-lasting social ties as well as address their social and economic issues. As demonstrated by the study The Impact of Halfway Houses on Parole Success and Recidivism, parolees who successfully complete a halfway house program were more likely to be successfully discharged from parole than parolees who were released from a correctional facility directly to parole.
But it turns out that halfway houses are a half-baked solution — while some halfway houses are properly run and staffed with qualified individuals, others show the corruption of a system that is conducted based on political favoritism or cronyism rather than fulfilling their responsibility to help the residents with their re-entry. In some cases, the occupants’ financial capacity is burdened by the fees and fines at halfway houses. Halfway houses rent can range in price from cheap $100-$300 per month to costly $2,000 or more per month with the majority between $400 and $800 per month. According to Norton Amendment Blocking Halfway House Subsistence Fees for Federal Inmates Passes House, “The fee is currently 25% of a resident’s income. However, offenders who are able to find work most often work at minimum wage jobs. The loss of 25% of their paychecks is a significant hurdle to successful reentry. It makes it extremely difficult for them to pay rent, child support, or fines and fees associated with their conviction, such as restitution.” Other subsistence fees include health services where inmates are required to pay $2 per healthcare visit. While $2 may seem insignificant, when inmates only make several dollars per hour on their work, $2 is substantial.
This inflicts further hardships on these returning citizens, especially those who manage to obtain employment and are working toward independence. Where this money goes leads to an investigation into the halfway house conducting system. According to internal county records obtained by The New York Times, by placing inmates at Delaney Hall in Essex County, the county earns a significant profit by renting beds to house federal inmates. About 40 percent of the county jail’s roughly 2,400 beds are now reserved for federal inmates. According to federal contracts, Essex County receives as much as $108 per day for each bed the federal government uses at the county jail, but spends $73 per day for a bed at Delaney Hall. The difference of about $35 a day per bed is extra revenue for the county. In order to maximize the revenue, the authorities are using halfway houses as dumping grounds for all kinds of inmates, which leads to a lot of difficulties in supervision.
Because of these halfway houses’ financial incentive, the money they profited doesn’t go to the improvement of the houses, therefore conditions there are often abysmal. “The living conditions were worse than in prison. When it rained, the halfway house staff would break out a dozen five-gallon buckets…we had two bathrooms for over 70 guys. And the owner liked to employ young twenty-something kids to staff the place (cheap labor), so at night while I tried to sleep, to be productive at my job the next day, the young staff were letting women, bottles of booze, and drugs in the front door,” Shon Hopwood, a lawyer who completed a stint at an Iowa halfway house, wrote. The situation can be even worse when houses aren’t run by national conglomerates. In Florida, where there are no regulations on the industry, Troy Charles, who had a history of substance abuse and jail time, decided to start his own halfway house in 2011. It turned out that Charles used most of the money to purchase drugs, and the house folded just a year later, after Charles shot a resident. All across the country, stories like these play out in poorly regulated halfway houses, and so far, very little has been done to improve the industry (When Jail is the Better Option: The Failure of Halfway Houses). Living conditions in these facilities are barely tolerable, with rampant corruption and abuse plaguing residents. “This industry just infuriates me,” stated Nancy Wolff, director of the Center for Behavioral Health Services and Criminal Justice Research at Rutgers University. “If you want to go there and sit in peer-run groups — or hang out and smoke and play cards and have access to drugs — it’s a great place.” Halfway houses are supposed to be the final step between prison and returning to society and are intended to provide counseling, job training, and other rehabilitative services. And yet, despite the billions of dollars invested in both public and private halfway houses, some of them have high recidivism rates. The recidivism rate for Community Education Centers (CEC), the company that runs 30 percent of all halfway houses nationwide, for example, is as high as 67 percent.
The public is calling for improvements to the halfway house system after realizing how detrimental halfway house conduction has been. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has already recognized how “counterproductive” subsistence fees are. In a November 2016 memo, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates noted that BOP’s “process for collecting these subsistence fees is costly and administratively burdensome for both RRC’s and [BOP],” and called for the DOJ to “develop a plan to limit the use of counterproductive ‘subsistence’ fees imposed on indigent residents.” These houses should have to adjust to steeper living-standard requirements, with a higher burden to provide the rehabilitative services that they promise. Full transparency and accountability are needed to ensure that halfway houses that break the rules are punished for it. The huge funds halfway houses received and the profits they earned should be put into expanding medical access, giving more work opportunities, and lowering the housing charges for the inmates. Charging them copays and subsistence fees is antithetical to the goal of a halfway house. In a country where nearly two million members of the population are locked up, justice reform is crucial, and it needs to be holistic.
