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“Corrections has become a budget nightmare,” says Metropolis 2020 senior executive Paula Wolff, an alumna of that administration. If you put the state’s 245,000 prison inmates in one place, they’d comprise the second largest city in the state.
As Metropolis 2020 points out, following this political path of least resistance has made recidivism the path of least resistance for prisoners, who are often cut off from family ties. (Even if you own a reliable car, it’s no pleasure jaunt to Grayville or Mount Sterling.) It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what more than 70 percent of released prisoners in Chicago say, according to the report: “family support is an important factor in helping them avoid [returning to] prison . . . . If family relationships have become too tenuous or no longer exist, exiting prisoners are more susceptible to reestablishing gang and other criminal ties.” (This group is much too nice to put in the shiv about how few small-government family-values conservatives have objected to this policy, so I won’t either.)
