One way NYS is funding “reducing the madness of incarceration”

Note: A more complete treatment of this story by Brian Mann can be found here.

The state has awarded the Watertown Urban mission $40,850 to help cover the costs of its Bridge Program, the Watertown Daily Times reports. The program, one of 23 across the state to receive funding under a competitive grant program, supports alternative to incarceration detention programs (here’s more about The Bridge program)  Andrew Mangione told the paper that funding from the state since the 1980s has been “inconsistent”, and that this money restores it to “levels where it’s been.”

The funding comes at a time when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is focusing new energy on what, in last week’s State of the State address, he called “the madness of an incarceration society”. The state has eliminated 5,500 prison beds, the governor said, but lamented that “there’s a revolving door where 40 percent of the people who are released from prison wind up back in prison.” State Sen. Betty Little acknowledged to reporter Natasha Haverty for that story that many of the North Country’s prisons have lost the vocational and educational programs that were designed to help prevent such recidivism.

 

 

Tags: bridge program, Cuomo, new york state, prison, Watertown, watertown urban mission