The Second Chance Club: Hardship and Hope After Prison
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The Second Chance Club: Hardship and Hope After Prison
I went into this book expecting it to follow a pattern of many such memoirs I'd read about people working with difficult populations, expecting it to be a mixture of an accounting of the failures of the systems in place and the despair of the endless dead-end cycle of misery the author had seen. This book was not what I expected.Jason Hardy becomes a parole and probation officer mostly because he needs a job. But he finds himself surrounded by co-workers who truly believe in what they are doing, helping those in their charge. New Orleans is a poor city with a high crime rate, but I was surprised at every turn by how much it seemed the those in the criminal justice system there were doing their very best, for the most part. And often, the best isn't what I would have thought. Everyone involved tries to keep people out of jail or prison, but everyone also sees that sometimes, for drug addicts especially, jail can actually be a safer alternative than no jail. And I was struck by something the author talked about that I am surprised I never thought of before---the higher rates of incarceration since the late 1980s have led to lower crime rates, and that is probably not a coincidence. Hardy is by no means a "lock them all up" guy, but I've gotten a different perspective on jail and prison than I used to have, especially when the prison time is used to teach a trade or just keep people from overdosing.The human stories here are powerful, and none have easy answers. From the young woman who is too attracted to "dons", the powerful drug dealers, to the aging veteran who finally is ready to live a different life, to the mentally ill man who finally gets the diagnosis and medication he needs---no stories are tied up in the neat packages, but we see how a policy of "harm reduction", of if not curing everything, at least reducing the bad, can be one of hope.The book includes many ideas of how parole and probation could be improved without any additional costs, and I hope very much those in charge of budgets will give this important book a careful read.
