February 19, 2019, Josh Shapiro - The Philadelphia Inquirer
If you ran a company with a failure rate of 68 percent, how long do you think you would stay in business? My guess — not long.
Sixty-eight percent is the failure rate for our country’s prison system.
When two of every three people emerging from jail are rearrested and return to prison, it is clear our criminal justice system needs reform.
There are 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, and 86,000 of them are in Pennsylvania.
We are stuck in a cycle of people serving time for committed crimes, leaving prison, committing new crimes, and returning to serve more time behind bars.
As Pennsylvania’s chief law enforcement officer, I refuse to accept the chronic rate of recidivism in our system — and my office is taking action to reduce it.