The quest for redemption

Monday, Dec. 10, 2007 | 7:06 a.m.

Professor Cornell Horn served time in 11 prisons, but he had an edge - he was born with his nose in a book, ceased study only to commit crimes, and always planted that nose back on the page afterward, while behind bars or once he was out.

Working this way, Horn racked up two master's degrees and put a number of plaques on his wall - an academic who got there riding the wrong side of the tracks.

So it was absolutely uplifting to be hired for teaching positions at two Nevada colleges, and absolutely disappointing - but not surprising - to be let go from both after only a few years.

Though no one said it, Horn believes his past robbed his present. Getting fired is something ex-cons expect, Horn says. Not just from white-collar careers, because those are the exception, but from dishwashing jobs, warehouse jobs, menial jobs, if you can get one.

"These guys have no hope," he said, "And I am one."

It's a bleakness born from a radical shift in American prison policy, a shift that has multiplied the number of people behind bars as much as sevenfold in the past quarter-century. This explosive growth is the result of an increasingly punitive approach toward criminals, one that has replaced promises of rehabilitation with incarceration for all.

But this shift in attitude is colliding with an uncomfortable fact: We're running out of room, and critics say the swollen prison system is bankrupting its own best intentions. It is creating an incarceration mill that releases 650,000 felons annually - spitting them onto the streets worse than when they arrived, with records that prevent them from becoming anything else.

If the pattern holds, more than half will be back behind bars within three years.

It's no different in Nevada. During the past legislative session, a bill designed to reduce prison overcrowding made as many as 1,200 prisoners eligible for release. This same bill also relieved more than 2,300 parolees and probationers from supervision - as parole and probation spokesman J.R. Haggerty explained it, those felons simply "dropped right off the rolls."

They vanished into a world that offers them little support and less chance of sustaining a career that doesn't involve crime, Horn says. And this is where the professor, now teaching at the University of Phoenix, comes in.

Horn is working to launch a nonprofit organization, the Wellness, Redemption & Rehabilitation Program, that would help felons transition into society by offering practical support as well as the essential intangible - belief they deserve success when no one else does.

"I was one of those kids," he said. "But I grew up, and I'm ready to stand up to the storm."

In the 1960s many politicians and other people agreed that the best way to deal with crime was by targeting its root causes - poverty, lack of access to education, drug abuse and joblessness, among others. Those were bipartisan beliefs and the politicians who talked up government programs to address such issues (such as Lyndon Johnson declaring a "war on poverty") were preaching what the public wanted to hear, says Elliott Currie, a professor in the department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine.

"I think it's important to note how different our official attitude with crime was. The establishment attitude with crime was that it can't be solved by just locking people up. That you really have to address the conditions that are the root of crime," Currie said.

"The establishment all said that our response should not just be more cops and more prisons, and that was the dominant attitude of the country."

Only all those promised programs, those vows to address root causes of crime, never amounted to more than lip service. This is in part thanks to the Vietnam War, which cost so much to fight that there wasn't enough money left to spend on social programs. In this way, Vietnam inadvertently shaped the prison policy we know today.

"The money was literally not there, and it meant that the domestic problems just festered, and crime got really bad in a way that scared the heck out of people," Currie said.

By the 1970s, the crime problem got out of hand and people started clamoring for change. In response, politicians served up new "get tough" policies. Sentences were extended and imposed on criminals for lesser offenses than ever before. The number of people behind bars grew exponentially and accelerated anew in the 1980s, when the war on drugs was fought in inner-city trenches.

"We went out aggressively trying to put people behind bars for even minor drug offenses," Currie said. "We chose to use incarceration as almost our sole tool for taking care of (drug problems) and the result is what we see - the vast increase of the incarcerated population."

Incarceration as a method of managing crime has gelled with mainstream society, not necessarily because we approve, but because it's what we're used to, says Currie, whose college students cannot imagine when it was any other way.

The state and federal prison population was less than 190,000 in the 1970s. In 2006 there were more than 2.25 million people behind bars in America, according to the Department of Justice.

Nevada's prison population is almost 13,000, projected to grow by 27 percent by 2011, according to the Pew Charitable Trust Public Safety Performance project. If the estimate is accurate, it places Nevada among the top 10 states for prison growth.

This means that Horn should have no shortage of felons to work with, provided he can get his organization off the ground. But it is hard to find the money. If incarceration is expensive then rehabilitation is a luxury.

The cost of operating America's penal system exceeds $60 billion a year, up more than 1,500 percent in the past 30 years, says UNLV criminal justice professor Randall Shelden. That has squeezed the coffers of many states; Nevada's Department of Corrections budget for fiscal 2007 is approximately $258 million.

Things such as high school courses for prisoners, drug counseling, anger management classes - services, many studies show, that lower the rate of recidivism for those who participate - are cut to save money.

The net result is more prisoners with access to fewer programs, which leaves felons who have no real skills more likely to gravitate to crime on release, Shelden says. And it appears to be catching.

"You have at least 2 million children (in America) who have a parent in prison," Shelden said. "And guess what the No. 1 indicator of chronic delinquency is?"

Horn's father abandoned his family and left Horn and his siblings to grow up in Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood. To make money, Horn began selling drugs, which landed him in jail on several occasions. He also was arrested for robbery and for a series of fights. In between incarcerations, Horn studied at California State University, Los Angeles, College of Marin and Los Angeles Trade-Technical College. But, Horn said, he kept "going back and back and back."

By his late 20s, Horn was serving time in California's San Quentin. It was in that massive concrete prison that Horn "woke up" and started trying to convince inmates they could be something more than felons.

"Guys that are older try to share with the younger dudes. I tried to share my hustle. I call it the school hustle," he said. "Why choose the hustle that's going to limit you? There's only going to be one drug dealer on that block. Only one basketball player."

After being pushed through the prison system, he says, it's almost as if ex-cons don't believe legitimate success is in the realm of possibility.

"It's nurture, not nature," Horn said. "When we understand we can do it, the behavior follows."

It's been 11 years since Horn was released from his last prison sentence. Today, the 45-year-old has master's degrees in philosophy and political science and is completing a doctorate in organizational leadership.

By starting the Wellness, Redemption & Rehabilitation Program, he hopes to reduce recidivism through counseling, support groups and employment skill training, with specialized assistance for sex offenders who have been deemed low risk by the courts.

"These guys have no hope," he said. "I want to give it back."