http://www.c-span.org/Events/C-SPAN-Event/10737424714/

How often do we hear about some ex-con committing an atrocious crime after release from prison? Too often is the right answer. But ‘too often’ can be ‘not as much as we used to’.

The question is: how can we get to ‘not as much as we used to’?

The notion that state prison systems are most often called some variant of a department of ‘correction’ is an aspiration. It is an aspiration that is, however, undermined by housing complications upon release, drug and medical issues after release, the lack of employment after release, and criminal records. But ‘correction’ is an aspiration we can realize. Here’s how.

When inmates are sentenced and serve time behind bars they have a lot of time on their hands. This time can be used to improve the inmate, or not. While in prison, if available, inmates can participate in various recidivism reducing treatment programs. This include but are not limited to anger management, drug treatment, education and vocation training, sex offender relapse prevention, to name a few. Programs are necessary but not entirely sufficient.

After release from prison, life often becomes more difficult for ex-offenders that it was while locked-up. The three most pressing re-entry challenges are: a place to live/housing; drug treatment/medical care; and employment. A deficiency in any one of these three is a serious risk factor to relapse.

For example, when I was working for a jail system, there was an inmate who was homeless and every winter season would intentionally get arrested for a petty crime, would get locked up and then wouldn’t (or couldn’t) post bail just so he could have ‘three hots’ and a cot’ (three hot meals and a bed to sleep in). This is wrong. And inmate fees won’t solve this problem; we can’t get blood from a stone.

One of the obstacles to reentry support for ex-offenders is opposition from the public, which translate into political will, that thinks that inmates are getting something that the rest of us law abiding citizens aren’t getting. I’ve spoken with many people who say, 1) why should they get housing support, or job placement, or health care? 2) No one helps me with those things. 3) My son who just graduated from college needs a job; why should he be bumped in favor of someone who did a crime?

These are all legitimate and important concerns. A visceral reaction is that “we should just keep them locked-up” or “they screwed-up; too bad for them.” But keeping them locked up becomes impossibly expensive, and in not helping them be successful upon release we are not helping our communities.

My response to each of these includes: 1) because the chances of them reoffending is higher without support in these areas and it is cheaper to give them support than to deal with the consequences of a crime, which may or may not involve a victim. 2) True, no one helps you with those things so you know how difficult it is; now add to that a criminal record, no family and friends supporting you, and laws that prohibit you from working and living in certain places. And 3) your college graduate son is very unlikely to be competing with an ex-con for a job so it is unlikely that your educated son will lose an opportunity over one afforded to an ex-con. Even if your child didn’t go to college, your child is likely in a very different vocational place than an ex-offender.

Probation and parole, both used post-release to monitor inmates, are very important to help reducing recidivism. The idea that we release ex-cons from prison with all the re-entry challenges that they face without supervision is absurd. Some form of post-release supervision is important. This need not always be done by the government. Non-profits and religious organizations are a good place to turn to for help with this endeavor. In addition to probation and parole, on this idea, Day Reporting Centers can also be effective.

This idea of someone being an ex-con is just that: if someone is an ex-con that means they are a former convicted offender; this does not necessarily mean that they are currently an offender. This brings me to my next point: Second Chance Legislation. Everyone makes mistakes. Some mistakes are not serious; clearly some are. There is very good evidence that after being crime free for seven years, the probability of reoffending is about the same as someone who never offended in the first place. Depending on the initial crime, this might be grounds for someone to have a criminal record sealed or expunged. Why do that? Because a criminal record often acts as a continued sentence and makes it more difficult for ex-offenders to get housing, jobs and educational opportunities. I am fully aware of the importance of a criminal record as a public safety tool. My point is that after a certain time has passed and someone has not reoffended, a criminal record might not always be a public safety tool or in the best interest of justice.

Returning where we began, one very important thing to remember about reducing recidivism is that we can only reduce recidivism, not eliminate recidivism. There is no magic pill or program that will end recidivism. The most effective programs have been found to reduce recidivism by about 10 to 15 percent; on rare occasion, up to 20 percent. Treatment programs work, but this doesn’t mean that everyone who participates in a program will be crime free upon release.

For example, assume the normal rate of recidivism is 50 percent. Now, we have 100 offenders participate in a prison treatment program that works. (Let’s assume that it is evidence-based and it does reduce recidivism by a modest 10 percent.) Without the program, 50 people will reoffend. With the program, 45 people will re-offend; meaning 5 less people won’t reoffend. If 5 people doesn’t sound like a big deal, multiply that times the hundreds of thousands of offenders who might benefit from a treatment program. I think you get the picture.

Programs won’t ever reduce recidivism to zero, but if we can reduce it and improve the lives of offenders and potential victims, we must. It is very important to remember that not everyone who participates in a program will be a success; there will be failures. When we hear of a failure story in the media, just remember that there are also successes. In this example, I am just talking about in-prison programs; add to this equation post-release support and we can further decrease recidivism.

On this point about assuming that programs work. We should not just assume that prison programs work, even when they are evidence-based. We must always be measuring our efforts to make sure that they are delivering the outcomes that we want. An outcome isn’t people stepping up to the next phase of treatment, or serving increasing numbers of inmates, these are outputs. An outcomeis a change in behavior after release from prison. Measuring prison programs can be done, it must be done and it is something that can be done with relative ease and cost-efficiency.

The sooner society realizes that the better shape we release ex-offenders in and facilitate their successful re-entry into society, the safer all of us we will be.

The controversy surrounding “Aarakshan,” meaning reservation, a new Bollywood film by Prakash Jha, has once again brought to the fore the unsettled and simmering issues around caste-based reservation in higher education. The matter is so politically charged that Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh banned the screening of the film, although the ban was later lifted in the latter two states.

The policy of reserving 22.5% of government jobs and university seats for members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, known as Dalits and adivasis, respectively, goes back to the Indian Constitution. But far more controversial was the more recent mandating of an additional reservation of 27% of seats for people who fall into other disadvantaged groups, known as Other Backward Classes, bringing the total reservation up to almost 50%.  This additional reservation in higher education was finally mandated by the Supreme Court in 2008.

The principal rationale for caste-based reservation in India, akin to race-based affirmative action in the United States, is to create equality of opportunity for historically disadvantaged groups. A related argument is that the historical fact of long-standing social repression is in itself a morally compelling reason for the counter-balancing force of reservation.

As I’ve suggested recently, inequality of outcomes is crucially affected by inequality of access. So, in theory, the argument that reservation, by creating a level playing field, will in the longer run alleviate inequality and other social deprivations makes sense. However, this begs the question of whether the system does, in fact, deliver on these benefits for disadvantaged groups.

Critics of reservation, as cited in a recent paper, argue, amongst other things, that caste-based quotas stigmatize rather than uplift targeted groups, and they entrench rather than alleviate long-standing inequalities. As Mr. Jha himself notes, one often hears people ask, “Would you want to be treated by a doctor who got in to medical school through reservation?”

Caste-based reservation may also carry unintended negative side effects along other dimensions of historical disadvantage. A much cited study finds that caste-based reservationreduced the overall number of women gaining admission into engineering colleges, because women were under-represented amongst those applying in the reserved category.

Leaving these arguments aside, the crucial questions are the ones I started with: Does caste-based reservation lead to improved educational outcomes for students in both the reserved and open categories?

A recent study by economics professor Sheetal Sekhri of the University of Virginia uses data from Indian college admission tests and exit results to test statistically whether the introduction of reservation raises educational performance as compared to an alternative hypothetical scenario of a pure meritocracy, where students are admitted based only on their rankings in admission tests.

The results of the study are not encouraging.  A higher average “quality” of upper-caste students, defined by high performance on admission tests, has a negative impact on the academic performance of lower-caste students, the study says. Further, the performance of upper-caste students, as measured by exit tests, is also adversely affected by reservation, with the strongest effects on high-achieving upper-caste students.

Professor Sekhri interprets these results as suggesting that upper and lower caste students are in “competition” over scarce academic resources, such as access to faculty, support services, social networking, etc. and thus they tend to provide peer support only to their own caste members. Her striking conclusion is that a more integrated college environment, mandated by reservation, doesn’t achieve its intended goals of raising the educational performance of disadvantaged groups. And this discouraging finding is in line with other scholarly studies, such as by Anjani Kochar of the Stanford Center for International Development.

Reserving seats for the underprivileged has also created a private sector response by the relatively well off, who come mostly from the upper castes. Just take a look at the booming industry of “coaching classes,” which prepare students to take admissions tests for the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management.

Of course, reservations didn’t create coaching classes, which have been around for a long time as a response to the poor quality of the education system. But reservations certainly accentuated the growth of this industry by inducing upper caste students to compete for a smaller share of a fixed number of university seats.

An estimate by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry suggests that the coaching industry is worth a whopping $2.2 billion a year, with the typical student paying over $2000 for eight months of coaching, comprising as much as a third of a middle-class family’s budget. The cost of coaching is beyond the reach of many poor and lower middle income families, who are disproportionately represented by lower castes.

Rupa Subramanya Dehejia writes Economics Journal for India Real Time. You may follow her on Twitter @RupaSubramanya.

Although many of the participants work in academic institutions and social justice networks, AAPF realizes that existing institutional settings do not always provide the most fertile terrain for the development of ideas to advance scholar’s and activist’s projects. Consequently, AAPF seeks to create environments built around broadly shared values and visions of society in order to support and sustain this work.

A result of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Affirmative Act remained largely unchanged until the late 1990s.

In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled “universities cannot establish quotas for members of certain racial groups” but may “consider race or ethnicity more flexibly as a ‘plus’ factor in the context of individualized consideration.”

In 2006, Michigan voters approved a statewide ballot proposal to amend the Michigan Constitution “to prohibit all sex- and race-based preferences in public education, public employment, and public contracting.”

Proposal 2 forced Michigan’s public colleges and universities “to modify the policies they had in place for nearly a half-century to remove consideration of ‘race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin’ in admissions decisions. No other admissions criteria – for example, grades, athletic ability, or family alumni connections – suffered the same fate,” according to the opinion written by Judge Ransey Guy Cole, Jr.

The day after the amendment passed, several interest groups and individuals filed a federal suit against then-Governor Jennifer Granholm, the Regents of the University of Michigan, the Board of Trustees of Michigan State University and the Board of Governors at Wayne State University.

The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigration Rights and Fight for Equality said Proposal 2 violated the U.S. Constitution and federal statutory law. Michigan’s then-Attorney General Michael Cox intervened as a defendant.

A group of University of Michigan faculty members, prospective and current students filed a similar suit in District Court against Governor Granholm. Their case was consolidated with that of a U of M Law School applicant and Toward a Fair Michigan, a non-profit corporation formed to ensure implementation of Proposal 2. Attorney General Cox again intervened, and replaced Governor Granholm as the representative of Michigan in the litigation.

The District Court rejected their argument “that Proposal 2 violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.” A motion for summary judgment was granted, and the appeals followed.

In the 2-1 opinion, Judge Cole wrote that the ban “unconstitutionally alters Michigan’s political structure by impermissibly burdening racial minorities.” Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey agreed.

The decision further states that “the stark contrast between the avenues for political change available to different admissions proponents following Proposal 2 illustrates why the amendment cannot be construed as a mere repeal of an existing race-related policy. Had those favoring abolition of race-conscious admissions successfully lobbied the universities’ admissions units, just as underrepresented minorities did to have these policies adopted in the first place, there would be no equal protection problem.”

Judge Julia Smith Gibbons dissented the opinion, stating, “Proposal 2 is not unconstitutional under traditional equal protection analysis.”

“Michigan has chosen to structure its university system such that politics plays no part in university admissions at all levels within its constitutionally created universities,” she continued. “The Michigan voters have therefore not restructured the political process in their state by amending their state constitution; they have merely employed it.”

Michigan’s current Attorney General, Bill Schuette, is planning to appeal the court’s ruling.

Read more.

May 20, 2011

Zimbabwe’s leading economic empowerment lobby Group the Affirmative Action Group has taken to the popular social networking site FACEBOOK to build up its membership and spread the Economic empowerment agenda. The AAG Secretary General Mr Tafadzwa Musarara confirmed the development and added that the AAG was on expansionary phase also aimed at encouraging Zimbabweans in the Diaspora to participate in rebuilding the Economy.

The lobby Group’s page lists Phillip Chiyangwa,Saviour Kasukuwere, Strive Masiyiwa, Peter Pamire as being among the founders the group which now has membership of more than 100,000 Zimbabweans. The latest social media forays are aimed at increasing the Group’s membership beyond Zimbabwe and strengthen its brand as a leading voice to level the economic playing field.

Affirmative has been used the world over to correct historical imbalances on economic and financial opportunities in many countries including USA,Brazil ,India etc.Affirmative Action refers to positive steps aimed at increasing the inclusion of historically excluded groups in employment, education and business.

Affirmative Action Group Zimbabwe seeks to attain the broad based black economic empowerment of the indiginous Zimbabweans in the areas of education , employment and business.

Affirmative Action refers to positive steps aimed at increasing the inclusion of historically excluded groups in employment, education and business. Such steps are not designed to offer preferential treatment to, or exclude from participation, any group. To the contrary, Affirmative Action policies are intended to promote access for the traditionally underrepresented through heightened outreach and efforts at inclusion.

The AAG’s stated mission is to be the Vanguard of broad black economic empowerment in Zimbabwe.

The current Executive led by Supa Mandiwanzira and Tafadzwa Musarara made a historic presentation at the Jerusalem plenary session which discussed the Kimberly Process admission of Zimbabwe’s diamonds late last year.

Posted on www.zimdaily.com