Biden’s Second Chance Act becomes law
Source: The News Journal
April 10, 2008
Biden’s Second Chance Act becomes law
By NICOLE GAUDIANO
Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON — President Bush signed into law Sen. Joe Biden’s legislation to help convicted felons who have served their time return to society today.
The Second Chance Act is designed to help reduce the number of convicted felons who become repeat offenders by funding job and literacy training, substance-abuse treatment, counseling, education, housing and mentoring services for ex-offenders upon their release.
The Delaware Democrat has worked for the past several years to expand the bipartisan coalition of support for the legislation. It passed the Senate unanimously on March 11 with 34 co-sponsors and was signed into law during a ceremony at the White House today.
“Our current system is broken,” said Biden, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee on Crime and Drugs. “Unfortunately, many ex-offenders return to prison over and over again – the door is often a revolving one. The only way to close it is to open another one. That’s what this legislation does.”
The law authorizes $330 million to improve state and local government offender reentry programs, create new competitive grants for innovative programs to reduce recidivism and strengthen the Bureau of Prison’s ability to provide reentry services to federal prisoners and establish an elderly non-violent offender pilot program.
The money would still have to be appropriated in a future spending bill.
Biden said in a statement that the law could eventually save taxpayers hundreds of millions by reducing recidivism.
Each year, 650,000 prisoners are released from jail and an estimated two thirds are rearrested within three years, Bush said during the ceremony.
Bush said the law authorizes important parts of his administration’s Prison Re-entry Initiative, piloted in 20 states over the past three years with results he said were promising. Eighteen percent of those enrolled in the program have been arrested again within a year, less than half the national average, he said.
The law will build on work to help prisoners reclaim their lives, Bush said.
“In other words, it basically says: ‘We’re standing with you, not against you.”
