Trying to Break Cycle of Prison at Street Level
By SOLOMON MOORE
New York Times
HOUSTON — Corey Taylor, a convicted drug dealer, recently got out of prison and moved into his grandmother’s house in Sunnyside, a south central Houston neighborhood of small, tidy yards.
During his first days home, Mr. Taylor, 26, got a sharp reminder of the neighborhood’s chronic problems.
“Out of 10 of my partners, only one is doing anything different,” he said, referring to his former drug-dealing companions. “I have some friends I haven’t seen for 10 years because either I was locked up or they were locked up.”
Last year, 32,585 prisoners were released on state parole in Texas, and many of them returned to neighborhoods where they live among thousands of other parolees and probationers.
Sunnyside is one of 10 neighborhoods in Houston that together accounted for 15 percent of the city’s population, yet received half of the 6,283 prisoners released in Houston in 2005, according to the Justice Mapping Center, a criminal justice research group.
The group, which is based in Brooklyn, has done work for the Texas Legislature that helped lead to a $217 million expansion of rehabilitation services.
Neighborhoods like Sunnyside can be found in virtually every big city in the nation. Even as violent crime statistics trend downward, incarceration rates throughout the country remain at a historic high of 750 per 100,000 residents. Each year about 650,000 prisoners are released on parole, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
HOUSTON — Corey Taylor, a convicted drug dealer, recently got out of prison and moved into his grandmother’s house in Sunnyside, a south central Houston neighborhood of small, tidy yards.
During his first days home, Mr. Taylor, 26, got a sharp reminder of the neighborhood’s chronic problems.
“Out of 10 of my partners, only one is doing anything different,” he said, referring to his former drug-dealing companions. “I have some friends I haven’t seen for 10 years because either I was locked up or they were locked up.”
Last year, 32,585 prisoners were released on state parole in Texas, and many of them returned to neighborhoods where they live among thousands of other parolees and probationers.
Sunnyside is one of 10 neighborhoods in Houston that together accounted for 15 percent of the city’s population, yet received half of the 6,283 prisoners released in Houston in 2005, according to the Justice Mapping Center, a criminal justice research group.
The group, which is based in Brooklyn, has done work for the Texas Legislature that helped lead to a $217 million expansion of rehabilitation services.
Neighborhoods like Sunnyside can be found in virtually every big city in the nation. Even as violent crime statistics trend downward, incarceration rates throughout the country remain at a historic high of 750 per 100,000 residents. Each year about 650,000 prisoners are released on parole, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
(Continued here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home