The governor will also visit a soup kitchen during his stop in Camden
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Gov. Chris Christie will visit Camden today to lay out his initiative for returning prisoners to society.CAMDEN — Gov. Chris Christie is expected to announce a new initiative today aimed at reducing the burden on the state prison system, and its cost to taxpayers, by helping more people break drug and alcohol addictions so they can return to society rather than revolve in and out of prison.
According to details of the announcement obtained by The Star-Ledger, Christie will unveil the initiative this morning following a tour of Cathedral Kitchen, which serves meals to needy people in Camden and offers cooking classes for the unemployed, unskilled or recently-released prisoners.
The initiative calls for expanding the state’s Drug Court Program, which offers non-violent drug offenders treatment and recovery counseling rather than prison sentences. It also calls for the creation of a Governor’s Task Force of Recidivism Reduction to coordinate the state’s programs to help prisoners re-enter society, as well as a real-time database to track individuals involved in the re-entry programs to assess their success.
Christie’s changes are intended to bring centralized oversight to the state’s prisoner re-entry efforts, and mark the former federal prosecutor’s first major foray into criminal justice policy since taking office. Reducing prison populations and improving prisoner re-entry programs have also been a major focus of First Lady Mary Pat Christie, who will join the governor at the announcement this morning.
The initiative adopts many of the recommendations made to the Christie administration by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative New York City-based think tank with a progressive reputation on prison issues, which was commissioned to analyze the state’s current prisoner re-entry system.
The institute found the state’s existing re-entry efforts amounted to “a confusing system with no centralized definitions and mission, a lack of accountability for outcomes... and a lack of coordination, with potential duplication of services and no continuity between services provided in prison, during parole and in the community.”
The Governor’s initiative seeks to address those problems and calls for:
• Expanding the state’s Drug Court program, which allows those convicted of certain non-violent drug offenses to bypass incarceration by agreeing to a strict regimen of court appearances and drug or alcohol treatment and other recovery services to break the addiction.
• The creation of the Task Force for Recidivism Reduction, which will be co-chaired by attorney Lisa Puglisi, with the state Department of Corrections and the State Parole Board, and James Plousis, chairman of the State Parole Board. The task force will coordinate the many treatment and reentry programs across the state government to bolster reentry efforts, as well as make recommendations to the governor on how to improve those programs.
• The task force will also assess the effectiveness of all reentry programs currently offered using a real-time recidivism database, which will allow officials to track individuals and the success of the programs they participate in. Using the data, the task force will identify programs that fail and suggest how resources could be better spent to improve recidivism rates.
Related coverage:
• Gov. Chris Christie signs bill ending early-release program for inmates
• N.J. inmate in middle of political fight over early release program
