A goal of prison is to deter crime, but too often, it turns one-time lawbreakers into repeat offenders.
As director of the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles (ABPP), Cam Ward has been striving to reduce the state's recidivism rate.
He joined 1819 News CEO Byran Dawson last week on "1819 News: The Podcast" to discuss the innovative ways the Bureau's Parole Reentry Program (PREP) Center is doing just that.
Ward described the ABPP as a "carrot and stick" agency, offering harsh penalties for the "bad apples" and incentives to offenders to turn their lives around.
"So the stick is, if you do wrong and commit crimes, you're going to go to prison. But we're going to give you carrots too, because roughly 54 to 55 percent of everyone who leaves the prison system today or is on probation has either a drug addiction or they have a mental health addiction. And most of the time, it's both. And so if you don't address those problems, they're going to come right back in. And that tends to be the highest recidivism rate," he explained.
With the help of the PREP Center in Perry County, Ward's goal is to cut Alabama's prison reentry rate from 29% to below 15% by 2030.
"The reason PREP is so important ... is recidivism is our biggest job," he outlined. "And that means within three years of getting convicted of a crime, did I go back and commit a new crime?"
Ward said PERP has already been "successful by my wildest dreams."
"We do job training," he said. "So we have Ingraham State Technical College. We provide 15 different job training programs out there. We also, ironically, have 15 private sector partners that are wanting to hire these people who are formerly incarcerated because they need skilled manufacturing jobs that they can't find right now in the regular workforce. Another thing we do is we provide mental health treatment depending on your needs, also drug treatment based upon your needs. The beauty of this program, it's a 90-day program. It can be extended to 120, but the beauty has been this: in two and a half years, we've had over 450 people graduate. In those two and a half years, we have yet to have a single person graduate, go back and commit a crime. And that's public safety."
Ward added, "It's our number one job, is to make sure the public is safe. Those kinds of programs targeted at the right people can greatly reduce crime. And so I feel like that's been the benefit and the beauty."
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