Welcome to America, where 2.3 million people are locked up, and each year 600,000 of those individuals will be coming home, often to communities near you. For the most part, they will leave prison uneducated, unskilled, unprepared, and angry at having spent years locked away in a warehouse. This is the legacy of the law-and-order movement and the prison boom of the 1990s: America is in the midst of an incarceration and post incarceration crisis.
Please note, this article focuses on the reentry and rehabilitation component of correctional policy. Although it does - at different times - discuss the war on drugs, sentencing policies, and other critically important issues, its central focus remains reentry policy.
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V: Mandating Official Photo Identification for All Exiting Prisoners
In most states, when individuals are released from prison, they are not provided with appropriate identifying documentation that would enable them to obtain official, state-issued identification cards.
In 2003 the National H.I.R.E. Network conducted a survey of state DOC efforts to provide inmates with proper identification documents upon release. The results of that survey triggered significant efforts - on behalf of both non-profit groups and some state-level policymakers – to address these concerns.
Minnesota, for example, installed state-approved photo ID equipment in several of its correctional facilities. DMV employees now routinely visit these facilities where they process photo ID’s and driver’s licenses for inmates nearing release.
Although the situation has improved in some states, the lack of appropriate identification still stands as a significant obstacle for individuals who are leaving prison and attempting to reenter society. At present, only one-third of states actually ensure that individuals leave prison with a state-issued ID card.
In some states, identification issued by the Department of Corrections is not considered sufficient proof of identity for purposes of receiving a driver’s license or non-driver’s photo ID. Proof of identity often requires additional documents, such as a Social Security Card, which most states do not provide to inmates prior at release.
Individuals leaving prison without an acceptable form of photo identification or important primary source documents may find the process of obtaining such documents costly, both in terms of money and time. Depending on the state, documents like birth certificates can cost more than $20 and take more than two months to arrive.
Even when individuals have the resources to obtain all of the documentation required to apply for a driver’s license or state-issued ID card from the DMV, they can face long processing lines: in California, parolees wait an estimated 2-6 months before receiving ID cards.
Any national plan to address the post-incarceration crisis in America must address the lack of proper identification that many exiting prisoners site as a primary obstacle to reestablishing their lives upon release. Without an acceptable form of identification, an individual will be cut off from legitimate work, given that no employer can hire any applicant who cannot sufficiently establish his identity.
The longer an individual goes without legitimate work and legitimate wages, the more likely he is to return to criminal endeavors to support himself. By failing to adequately address the issue of identification, states do a disservice to us all: to the individuals exiting prison; to their families; to the communities that are plagued by crime; to the taxpayers who must foot the bill for what has been a seemingly endless expansion of the American prison system.
Although several states have taken aggressive steps to address this issue, and proposals for such reform have recently been made in some state legislatures, Congress and the Obama administration cannot overlook the opportunity to tackle the identification issue on a national basis.
A national law requiring that state departments of corrections provide exiting inmates with an official form of identification represents a non-controversial and logical next step. Congress has already recognized the importance of proper identification for individuals leaving prisons. The Second Chance Act, after passing by wide margins in both the House and Senate, was signed into law by President Bush in April of 2008, and provides, in relevant part:
Obtaining identification.-- The Director shall assist prisoners in obtaining identification (including a social security card, driver's license or other official photo identification, or birth certificate) prior to release.
The identification provision of the Second Chance Act is an important step in facilitating prisoner reentry, but only applies to individuals leaving federal prisons. The vast majority of inmates in America, however, are incarcerated in state correctional facilities. As previously explained, most of those individuals do not receive adequate forms of official identification upon release.
The standard articulated in the Second Chance Act could be made applicable to state departments of corrections through new legislation. Although some react skeptically to this type of federal-state cooperation on issues related to state prisons, such cooperation is both absolutely necessary and far from unprecedented.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 provides an effective model for how such federal-state prison legislation can be implemented, and the aforementioned Second Chance Act provides the substance of the mandate. Congress should pass new legislation requiring that all state departments of corrections issue official forms of photo identification and/or assist inmates in obtaining necessary documents prior to release.
A component of the law should provide for the establishment of a national panel that will be charged with determining the most effective means of implementing the recommendations, based on a survey of the most effective state DOC policies currently in force. The Department of Justice should make the implementation of appropriate ID issuance policies a top priority in every state prison system. The Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics should monitor the implementation of the law, and track the progress of each state at achieving full implementation.
The Justice Department should be authorized to provide grant money to facilitate the implementation of the Act, with those grants administered by the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the National Institute of Justice. Those states who fail to comply with the Act’s requirements should, at the discretion of the Attorney General, be subject to not more than a 5% reduction of the funds for law enforcement and corrections to which they would otherwise be entitled during that fiscal year.