Jeremy Travis. But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry. Washington DC: The Urban Institute Press; 2005: ISBN 0-87766-750-0.

Excerpt

For the past three decades the rate of incarceration in the U.S. has steadily and dramatically increased to the point where it is higher than it has ever been anywhere before. As a society, we are embarking on an unprecedented social experiment: the extensive use of mass incarceration as our response to crime. An underappreciated aspect of this boom in incarceration is the “iron law of imprisonment”—that all prisoners (except for the very few who die while incarcerated) eventually return to society. In 2002, 630,000 individuals (over 1,700 per day) reentered society, a vast change from the 150,000 annual prison releases of 30 years ago. Many of these individuals are released to urban communities already burdened with high rates of crime, poverty and addiction. …