George W. Bush and the Second Chance Act for People Leaving Prison

On April 9, 2008, in the last year of a presidency that was by then deeply unpopular, George W. Bush signed a bill that almost nobody outside a small circle of advocates had heard of. The Second Chance Act authorized federal grants for programs that help people leaving prison find work, housing, addiction treatment and someone to call when things go wrong. The coalition behind it was an odd mix for the Bush years: evangelical ministers, big-city Democrats, sheriffs, and men and women who had done time. One of the loudest voices for the idea belonged to a man who had himself served a federal sentence decades earlier, after a career as one of Richard Nixon's toughest operators. His name was Charles Colson, and the strange road that led him from the Watergate scandal to a prison ministry is part of why a conservative president ended up championing a program for people most politicians preferred not to mention.

In short: The Second Chance Act of 2008 funds reentry services for people coming home from prison, and it passed with broad support from both parties because it joined an evangelical case for redemption to a practical case about public safety and cost. It has been renewed since, including in the First Step Act of 2018. It is modest in size, but it changed how governments think about the day someone walks out of prison.

The man who went from Watergate to the cellblock

Colson had been special counsel to President Nixon, known in Washington for his hard-edged political operations. In 1974, as the Watergate scandal unwound, he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with the Daniel Ellsberg case and served about seven months in federal prison. Around the same time he had a religious conversion that many in Washington initially greeted with suspicion. After his release, he founded Prison Fellowship, a Christian ministry that works inside prisons and with families of the incarcerated, and spent the rest of his life arguing that people behind bars deserved a path back.

Colson's story mattered politically because it gave a generation of conservative Christians a way to see prisoners not as a category to be warehoused but as people capable of change. Prison ministry became a serious force in evangelical life. By the early 2000s, that movement had relationships in Congress and in the White House, and it had a specific concern: what happened to people on the day of release.

The problem nobody owned

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people leave state and federal prisons in the United States, and for decades the system largely treated that moment as the end of its responsibility. A person might walk out with a bus ticket, a small amount of money, a set of clothes and a record that made landlords and employers wary. Many had addictions that had not been treated inside. Some had mental illnesses. Many had lost touch with family. A large share would be rearrested within a few years.

The reasons were not mysterious. A person with no job, no place to live and no support is more likely to return to what landed them in prison in the first place. But the agencies involved, corrections departments, parole boards, housing authorities, workforce programs, health departments, each saw only a slice of the problem, and none had the money or mandate to handle the transition.

In his 2004 State of the Union address, Bush proposed a prisoner reentry initiative, describing America as a land of second chances and arguing that people leaving prison should find a path toward a better life. It was a line that drew applause from both sides of the chamber and then, for several years, not much else. Getting from a speech to a statute took four more years.

Building the bill

The legislative work was bipartisan from the start. In the House, versions of a Second Chance Act were introduced in the mid-2000s with Republican and Democratic sponsors, among them Rob Portman of Ohio before he left the House to join the Bush administration, and Danny Davis, a Democrat who represented Chicago's West Side, a district where many families had someone coming home from prison. In the Senate, Sam Brownback of Kansas, one of the chamber's most prominent evangelical conservatives, worked alongside Democrats including Joe Biden of Delaware, who then chaired the Judiciary Committee's crime subcommittee.

The coalition outside Congress was just as mixed. Prison Fellowship and other faith groups lobbied conservatives. Civil rights and criminal justice groups lobbied liberals. Law-enforcement associations, including some sheriffs and corrections officials who were tired of seeing the same faces return, lent credibility. Researchers at the Council of State Governments and elsewhere supplied evidence about what worked.

Earlier versions stalled in committee. The bill that finally passed did so in the 110th Congress, after Democrats had taken control of both chambers in the 2006 elections. It cleared the House by a wide bipartisan margin in late 2007 and passed the Senate in early 2008. A Democratic Congress sent a reentry bill to a Republican president who had asked for one, and he signed it.

What the money pays for

The Second Chance Act is not an entitlement and does not guarantee anything to any individual. It authorizes competitive grants, run mostly through the Justice Department, to state and local governments, tribes and nonprofit organizations. Those grants pay for things like:

• Job training and placement for people leaving prison, including programs that work with employers willing to hire people with records.
• Substance use treatment that begins before release and continues afterward, so that a person does not lose access to care at the prison gate.
• Mentoring programs, often run by faith-based and community groups, that pair returning citizens with someone who can help with the practical and emotional work of starting over.
• Family programs that help parents reconnect with children.
• Planning grants that help states and counties coordinate the agencies that touch reentry.

The law also helped establish a national resource center to share research and practical guidance with the programs it funds. Over time the program has supported hundreds of grantees across the country.

The amounts are small next to what the country spends on incarceration itself, and appropriations have often fallen short of what the law authorized. That is a real limitation. But the act did something that money alone does not: it named reentry as a public responsibility, and it gave local programs a reason to measure whether what they were doing worked.

The argument against, and the evidence

Skeptics raised two objections, from opposite directions. Some fiscal conservatives questioned spending federal money on services that are mainly state and local responsibilities, and doubted that grant programs produce measurable results. Some progressives worried that a focus on individual reentry services would distract from the policies that put so many people in prison to begin with: long sentences, aggressive drug enforcement, and the way poverty and race shaped who got caught.

Both critiques have weight. The evidence on reentry programs is mixed: some programs show meaningful reductions in recidivism and improvements in employment, others show little effect, and the quality of the program matters a great deal. Federal evaluations of Second Chance grantees have found results that vary by site. Supporters argue, reasonably in my view, that this is an argument for funding and studying what works rather than for giving up on reentry. And the progressive worry, while fair, assumes a choice that does not exist. A person walking out of prison next month needs help next month, whatever Congress does about sentencing.

The broader point is the one Colson's movement made first. If a society takes away a person's liberty, it has some obligation to think about the person who comes back. That idea is not owned by either party.

The barriers that grant money cannot buy down

Reentry programs work inside a thicket of rules that no grant can repeal, and anyone who wants to understand why the Second Chance Act matters, and why it is not enough, has to know a few of them.

Start with identification. A person leaving prison often has no valid driver's license or state ID, and without one it is hard to open a bank account, sign a lease, fill out hiring paperwork or pick up a prescription. Getting an ID can require a birth certificate and a Social Security card, which may have been lost years ago, and replacing those can require an ID. Reentry programs spend a surprising amount of their time breaking that loop.

Then housing. Federal law bars certain people with records from public housing, and local housing authorities and private landlords have wide discretion to screen out many more. Transitional housing fills part of the gap, but beds are limited, and a person who cannot find housing may violate the conditions of parole simply by having no address.

Then work. Many states restrict occupational licenses for people with records, sometimes for jobs, like barbering or cosmetology, that prisons themselves train people to do. Some of these barriers have been eased in recent years, often with bipartisan votes, but they remain a patchwork.

Then health. People leaving prison have high rates of addiction and mental illness, and the weeks right after release carry a sharply elevated risk of overdose death, a finding documented in public health research. Whether someone leaves with health coverage, a supply of medication and a scheduled appointment can be a matter of life and death. In recent years, the federal government has allowed some states to begin Medicaid coverage for certain services shortly before release.

The Second Chance Act pays for people who help others get through all of this. It does not remove the walls. That is work for state legislatures, Congress and local governments, and it is one reason the reentry coalition keeps returning to the Capitol.

A law that keeps getting renewed

The Second Chance Act's authorization lapsed after its first several years, and supporters spent years pushing for a renewal. They got it in December 2018, when Congress reauthorized the program as part of the First Step Act, the bipartisan federal prison and sentencing bill signed by President Trump. The fact that a reentry program created under one Republican president was renewed under another, with Democratic votes both times, says something about how durable the coalition has been.

It has also had a quieter influence. The vocabulary of reentry, which once belonged mostly to specialists, is now common in state legislatures. Many states have created reentry councils, expanded access to identification documents for people leaving prison, eased occupational licensing barriers and passed laws to seal old records automatically. Not all of that traces to the Second Chance Act, but the act helped make the idea that release is a beginning rather than an ending part of ordinary policy talk.

There is a political footnote worth adding. Reentry has survived changes in party control precisely because it does not fit neatly into either side's story. Conservatives can see it as a matter of personal responsibility, family and faith; progressives can see it as a matter of racial justice and second chances denied too long. A program that lets both sides tell their own story about it is a program that tends to get renewed, and the Second Chance Act has been renewed because members of both parties found reasons of their own to keep it.

The people on the other side of the gate

The best way to understand the law is to picture the morning it is meant for. A man in his forties walks out of a state prison after a decade inside. His phone number is long gone, his driver's license expired years ago, and the last job on his application is from before the smartphone era. A reentry program funded under the act might have met him months before release, helped him get a state ID, lined up a bed in transitional housing and connected him to a warehouse employer that hires people with records. Or he might live in a county that never applied for a grant, and walk out with a bus ticket.

That difference, between a county with a plan and a county without one, is what the Second Chance Act was trying to close. It has not closed it everywhere. But the people who wrote it, a conservative president, a Kansas evangelical, a Chicago Democrat, a Delaware senator and a former Nixon aide who had worn prison clothes himself, understood that the man at the gate is a neighbour, and that whether he succeeds matters to everyone on the street he moves back to.

What you can do

Reentry is one of the places where an individual can make a visible difference quickly.

• Volunteer or give locally. In the organizations directory you can browse nonprofits by cause in every state; the justice reform and legal aid listings include groups that help people with records find jobs, housing and legal help.
• Ask your state legislators about reentry. Look up your representatives by address to reach your state legislators as well as your members of Congress. Ask whether your state helps people leaving prison get identification, treatment and housing on the day they walk out.
• Watch the bipartisan record. The common-ground page tracks bills that passed with votes from both parties, and reentry funding has repeatedly been one of them.
• Follow the wider story. The criminal justice reform topic page gathers coverage on sentencing, prisons and reentry across the states.

Colson died in 2012. The program he helped inspire still sends money to the morning after release, which is where most of the work of a second chance actually happens.