Mayor Bloomberg visited Rikers Island yesterday to announce a new program designed to give inmates who are at the highest risk of returning to jail a way to earn their GED, stay sober, or get a state-issued ID. "It's the little things," Bloomberg told reporters. "You ever try to get a job without a state-issued ID? Almost every job requires a high school degree these days," the mayor said, adding that inmates who keep returning as many as 20 or 30 times "get hungry after awhile" for a sense of normalcy.
The initiative, which is called the Individualized Correction Achievement Network (I-CAN), allows the Osborne Association and the Fortune Society to work with the Department of Corrections to target high-risk adult inmates while they await trial. Those particular inmates are 70% more likely to return to re-offend a year after being released. "We call what they're doing 'life on the installment plan,' " said Osborne's executive director Elizabeth Gaynes.
Mayor Bloomberg at Rikers Island yesterday (NYC Mayor's Office)
The DOC has created the "menu of billable items"—such as earning a GED, or obtaining an ID—and the city will pay a specific amount to Osborne and Fortune for each milestone reached. Corrections Commissioner Dora Schriro said the prices vary from $90 to several hundred dollars per completed task. The city has budgeted $3.6 million for 2,300 inmates to use I-CAN in 2013, and will not pay either organization unless results are achieved. Inmates will be monitored for a year after their release to confirm their completion of a particular goal. "I sleep at night," Gaynes said of the risk her organization has taken. "We're going to do it."
Inmates must be in custody for 20 days or longer to benefit from I-CAN, and the city will select them by using DOC data and an analysis program to match them with an appropriate service. 142 inmates have already enrolled in I-CAN this year. "This thing is starting at 90 miles per hour," president and CEO of the Fortune Society, JoAnne Page said. She added that "If you engage with people while they're locked up, you increase their odds" of not returning to jail.
Throughout the press conference, Mayor Bloomberg touted the city's lower incarceration rate since 2001—a decrease of 32%—and praised New York's leadership on the issue. Asked if he would take up prison reform as a national cause as he is currently doing with gun control (the last Congressional attempt deflated in 2011), the mayor shook his head. "You can't take on every issue," Bloomberg replied. "We've just shown here in New York that you can have a very low crime rate and a very low murder rate…It's hard to argue we don't know what we're doing."
