Paper short abstract:

Persons released from the US prison are increasingly dependent on a “non-profit” services for food and shelter. As “customers” many see the organizations’ practices augmenting civil rights erosion to put human rights beyond their reach, to which they respond in ways that increase recidivism.

Paper long abstract:

Forty years of increasing federal and state felonies, stacked charging, coercive plea bargains, long sentences, and extended time served before eligibility for parole have combined in the US to produce an imprisoned population of 2.4 million. In mid-1990s prison conditions declined with calls to eliminate "luxury" from prisions and jail, to offer only the constitutionally required level of medical care, and to outsource food services, charge prisoners for much of remaining subsistence. By 2005, more than 2000 statutes—known as felony-follows laws—restricting released persons' access to state and federal subsidized loans, housing and education, and to broad range of occupations. Release annually of mlore than 700,000 persons adds the millions already living under varied forms of state supervision. Increasingly concentrated in a few neighborhoods in a few large cities, members of this population compete for poor quality, scare housing, and jobs in a high unemployment, mainly service sector job market. While no released person encounters all the restrictive laws, "re-entry" service program become essential to survival. From research conducted among newly released persons in Arizona, I show how local market conditions combine with felony-following restrictions to make non-profits programs a service industry on which released persons must depend. In their stories we hear them service industry controls that emulate prison regulation, preferring to live on the street, resume criminal activity, and, when on parole, deliberately violate and return to prison. Another cycle of a civil rights erosion squeeze play moves them beyond the reach of international human rights conventions.