hburgnews.com

Today former AG Mark Earley is quoted in the Richmond Times, emphasizing the need for prison reform to “help [prisoners] successfully transition into society.” He’s critical of the “lock em up” crime policies he once helped to create. (article via TND)

Prisons swell to record size each year in part because many inmates unprepared for release wind up back behind bars. Public safety and the public treasury suffer, and so do the communities the offenders enter and leave, he said.

“I think it is one of the greatest domestic crises facing America today,” Earley told officials and activists gathered last week to improve support for released prisoners.

“We did a better job, probably than we even thought we were doing, of getting large numbers of people off the street,” he said. “But… we failed to recognize that the vast number of people who come into the prisons were going to be coming out.”

Earley also said, “It’s time just to re-examine the whole issue of how many people are we putting in jail, what are we putting them in there for, how long are we keeping them and what are we doing with them when they’re in.”

It sounds to me like it’s all coming down to saving tax money.

Earley’s comments shed new light on Sen Mark Obenshain’s call to shut down the Gemeinschaft on Chicago Ave. Earley said, “We failed to ask the question: ‘What are we going to do… to give them the opportunity to transform their life… when they return to their communities?’”

In case you missed it, Saturday, David Reynolds reported on a Gemeinschaft grad who also just graduated from JMU this past weekend. The current issue of eightyone has a feature on Gemeinshaft, too.

It would be interesting to hear what Maxine Roles has to say about all this.