Epilogue

Abstract

Robert Rubin (2016), former Treasury Secretary from 1995 to 1999 and current cochairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote an editorial in the New York Times on what society needs to do to help former inmates thrive upon release from prison. He offered the following quote from an inmate in San Quentin prison in California: “I don’t understand why over the 18-year period of my incarceration, over $900,000 was paid to keep me in prison. But when I was paroled, I was given $200.00 and told ‘good luck.’” Herein lies the ongoing disjuncture between the costs and expenses of a mass incarceration strategy and the promise of prisoner reentry efforts within communities. Prisons are real and so are their costs. Prisoner reentry is real as well, and so are its costs, but we have not had the national resolve and the political will to move away from the mass incarceration strategy to an approach that recognizes the importance of prisoner reentry.