Just briefly, approximately 650,000 Americans come out of prison every year, to give you a sense of the scale in our country. One of the buzzwords in Washington in the last five to six years has been this notion of re-entry.
These numbers have become so significant that we have been forced to reckon with the fact that almost everybody who goes into prison does come out. So we've had a lot of research around the re-entry process over the last five to six years, and I think it will inform your question to some degree.
The two most important factors to a successful transition out of prison--for the one-third of people who are not re-arrested and go back within three years of release--is being able to find housing and employment upon release. The longer people are incarcerated, the more difficult that is. The successful keys are often individuals being able to keep connections to their family networks. That's often their only support system. The only person who's likely to hire them may have been the person for whom they had worked in the past who's willing to give them another chance.
As sentences increase, we definitely have seen those networks erode, thus recidivism is a much bigger concern as a result of these connections eroding. So that I think informs that question to some degree.