The Volunteers of America facility serves as a halfway house, too. Which means it is supposed to be helping convicts reenter society.
From what I have heard and seen so far, it looks like money misspent or underspent.
First, the convicts get no help finding work. The job searches are all on their own.
Second, there is no counseling except some drug classes for some of the people. Since the federal government handed some of these people sentences like the circus hands out peanuts, they need some help getting away from institutional life and into the real world.
To me, this looks like a system designed to fail. One fellow here agrees. He thinks it provides the prison system with steady employees! I am not sure that I am that cynical.
It could be that the federal Bureau of Prisons really does not care how it spends its money.
Bureaucrats cannot have a budget that does not increase. What happens to the Bureau of Prisons if the criminal population declines?
But the claim is, rehabilitation does not work. What I see here is, at best, a shoddy rehabilitation program. At worst, the re-entry program does not exist.
I see here people who want no return to prison. They struggle finding work and dealing all too often petty rules. One fellow missed a job interview because the caseworker put the wrong time on his pass, and so he missed his bus to the interview. (Indianapolis lacks a public transportation system commensurate with its size.)
I know what it is to struggle and strive hard and make no progress. Depression came from that situation, and from depression came self-destruction. Why should their frustration not result ultimately in bad behavior?
I do not discount another cause for the federal Bureau of Prisons nonchalant attitude. Why worry about a million when budgets number in the billions? To the federal bureaucrats, this is pocket change. You might call it chump change.
Does that not make you wonder who is the chump?
Your tax dollars at work.
sch
[Rather surprising myself at how well I did see what was going on around me. For my own experiences in the same location during my re-entry phase, please click on this link: Halfway House Life. The details were a little different, but the overall ineptness of the re-entry program remains.]
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