Why Prison Reform Needs Social Workers

Why Prison Reform Needs Social Workers Alexander Brown, MBA, PHD, LCSW, and John Maki, JD When most of us think about prisons, we tend to imagine them merely as places we send people convicted of crimes. While prisons serve this purpose, they have also become a form of treatment for a significant number of our most troubled, mentally ill, and vulnerable citizens, most of whom are released and returned to their communities. Here are the numbers: over the past forty years, Illinois' adult prison population has increased by about 700%, going from around 6,000 to over 48,000 adult inmates and about 1,000 juveniles today. While many factors have contributed to this growth, drug policies and trends in mental health have played a particularly important role. As elected officials increased penalties for drug-based offenses and slashed state mental health budgets, they created laws and policies that have sent an increasing number of mentally ill and drug-addicted people to our state prisons. For instance, 60% of female prisoners in Illinois could potentially be diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder. [1] More than half of all prison and jail inmates (people in state and federal prisons and local jails) meet criteria for having mental health problems, six in ten meet criteria for a substance use problem, and more than a third meet criteria for having both a substance abuse and mental health problem. [2] The use of seclusion and restraint on persons with mental and substance use disorders has resulted in deaths and serious physical injury and psychological trauma. [3] While policies and practices have turned our prisons into revolving-door treatment (or in many cases, non-treatment) facilities, we have not funded or staffed them to provide the care and services that inmates need. Although we spend about $1.3 billion on our prison system, which means we spend about $20,000 a year to house an adult inmate and almost $90,000 to house a youth, only about 2% of that money goes to rehabilitative programming. Faced with limited and diminishing resources inside prison, offenders often encounter even less rehabilitative services when they are released, which produces unsurprising results. Every year, the Illinois Department of Corrections receives and releases about 35,000 inmates. More than half of these inmates will return to prison within three years of being released. Given these facts, it is clear that social workers have an important role to play in all aspects of correctional policy and operations, from entry to release, from creating smart and safe alternatives to incarceration to monitoring prison practices. The problem in most states is that prisons are closed and secretive environments, offering almost no access to anyone who is not incarcerated or employed by corrections. For 112 years, Illinois has been one of the few states that offers opportunities for people outside of corrections to monitor and help shape prison policy and practice through the nonprofit John Howard Association (JHA). Based in Chicago, JHA was founded in 1901 by social workers who believed that all citizens, whether they realized it or not, should have an investment in a safe, humane, and cost-effective prison system. Through our longstanding Prison Monitoring Project and Juvenile Justice Project, JHA staff and trained volunteers regularly tour all facilities in the Illinois Department of Corrections and the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice. During these tours, monitors are able to observe the challenges faced by both inmates and correctional staff and ensure that policies are implemented in a way that promotes public safety. Following our visits, JHA issues a written report that focuses on critical matters such as education, medical and mental health care, disciplinary procedures for youth and adults, and the physical condition of the facilities. These widely disseminated reports are read by everyone from lawyers to legislators, wardens to reformers, members of the governor's office to members of the public at large; they provide essential transparency and oversight to an otherwise overlooked institution and drive safe and cost-effective criminal justice reform. While JHA's Executive Director's training and experience as an attorney is invaluable to the organization's success, as a social worker, one of the authors (A. Brown) has found his involvement as a volunteer board member and prison monitor to be a clear expression of social work's core values of service: social justice, dignity and worth of the person, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence. As outlined in the NASW Code of Ethics, the primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and help meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty. "Serving on the board allows me to apply my social work skills on a macro level. By visiting prisons I engage at the micro level," says Brown. "One of the most powerful experiences of my professional career was talking to a young woman-through a crack in the steel door of her cell-who had been in prison for five years and isolation for the past eighteen months. She was agitated, panicky, and scared as she was scheduled to be released the following week and had nowhere to go. She was someone who was almost certainly abused as a child; had some degree of mental illness; had not made a meal or done laundry in years; had no high school degree; and had been alone for the last year and a half in a room smaller than my bathroom, and would soon be released without support or assistance. I couldn't imagine that she would not end up in some type of prison or mental health facility. Without extensive support and involvement from social workers both before and after release, which our current system does not allow,this young woman is almost certain to fail." However you look at it, our prison system is in need of significant reform. Perhaps the most fundamental problem facing prison reform is that it has for too long been narrowly focused on criminal justice. As long as prison reform is merely about what happens inside the four corners of a prison cell, it will fail. To improve outcomes for everyone and to create a more just and humane system, prison reform needs to focus on the impact of correctional policies on people, communities, and our systems of care. On every level, prison reform needs social workers. If you want to learn more about the Illinois prison system and how you can be part of reform efforts as a prison monitor, please visit JHA's website: http://thejha.org. REFERENCES Reichert, J., & Bostwick, L. (2010). Post-traumatic stress disorder and victimization among female prisoners in Illinois. llinois Criminal Justice Information Authority Retrieved from http://www.saferfoundation.org/files/documents/PTSD_Female_Prisoners_Report_1110.pdf. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. (2006) Mental health problems of prison and jail inmates. Retrieved from http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/mhppji.pdf. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). SAMHSA National Action Plan on Seclusion and Restraint, Revised and Adopted May 2003. Retrieved March 25, 2011, from http://www.samhsa.gov/seclusion/sr_handout.aspx. FURTHER READING Unasked Questions, Unintended Consequences: Fifteen Findings and Recommendations on Illinois' Prison Healthcare System: http://www.thejha.org/unaskedquestionshttp://naswil.org/news/chapter-news/featured/why-prison-reform-needs-social-workers/