Jindal proposal on inmate services designed to keep released prisoners from coming back

Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration wants a program of "pre-release" services to help prevent inmates held in local jails from returning to a life of crime once they are set free.

The program would be piloted in the Shreveport area before expanding later this year to Orleans Parish. It would provide an extra $7 per inmate per day to local sheriffs, who would contract with the state to provide a range of services to prisoners on the verge of being paroled.

Offenders leaving state prisons already get 100 hours of pre-release services, including education, drug counseling and vocational training along with classes on communications skills and job hunting. But such services are often scarce in parish and local jails, where the state typically sends inmates with shorter sentences.

Louisiana has the second-highest incarceration rate in the world, and statistics show that half of all offenders will return to prison within five years of being released. The governor said pre-release training can help reduce those rates, citing a program developed at Dixon Correctional Institute that brought the five-year recidivism rate down to 36 percent.

Corrections Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc, a former Dixon warden, said the goal is to lower the state's recidivism rate to 40 percent within five years.

The administration set aside $1.1 million for the program in its 2009-10 budget recommendations to the Legislature. Another $900,000 in the Department of Corrections budget for next year would finance "Day Reporting Centers" in New Orleans and Shreveport that provide early-intervention services to parolees who might otherwise end up back in jail for technical violations.

LeBlanc said the eventual goal is to stabilize a prison population that has grown dramatically in the past quarter century. One in 55 Louisiana adults was behind bars in 2007, compared to one in 205 adults in 1982.

The state currently spends $543 million a year on adult corrections, and $160 million more to house low-level offenders in parish and local jails. Approximately 15,000 inmates per year are released.

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Information from: The Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com