By Spencer Parts
For The Times

PRINCETON — “If we’re going to reclaim lives, we have to be in the business of reclaiming lives.”

That was the message of former Gov. Jim McGreevey on Saturday to students and community members taking part in a two-day conference at Princeton University on reforming the criminal justice system.

The way people re-enter the world after serving a prison sentence simply sets them up for failure, McGreevey said, adding that they are released with addictions untreated, without education and with a rap sheet that makes finding employment difficult.

“The new scarlet letter is ‘F’ for felony,” McGreevey said, and described the ways that formerly incarcerated people are discriminated against in the workplace.

McGreevey, who has made the issue his central focus since he resigned as governor in November 2004, said part of the problem is the way that the public thinks about the character of formerly incarcerated people.

“All of those quote-unquote bad people are getting out, and they’re coming to a neighborhood near you,” McGreevey said. That has resulted in a reluctance to fund programs that help incarcerated people become productive when they get out of jail.

“All right, let’s not educate people, and let’s let them continue engaging in violence,” McGreevey said. “It’s so stupid.”

McGreevey’s activism on the issue has included ministering to female prisoners at Hudson County Correctional Center, and most recently, being named the executive director of the Jersey City Employment and Training Program, which administers the city’s employment program.

He hopes to use his experience to implement a prisoner re-entry program that can become a national model.

Throughout the United States, McGreevey said, recidivism — repeat offending — is high, with as many as two-thirds of those released from prison rearrested within three years and more than 50 percent back in prison, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Many of those are addicts, McGreevey said, citing statistics that estimate nearly 70 percent of those in prison are addicts.

The treatment program he works with stresses addiction treatment, which McGreevey believes is an important component of re-entry.

“If at the end of the day, if we don’t treat someone for the systemic reason that they have been engaging in criminal behavior, we have accomplished nothing,” McGreevey said.

McGreevey expressed optimism regarding the future of the movement, citing bipartisan reform efforts on the national level, such as the Smarter Sentencing Act, introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Republican Mike Lee of Utah and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois).

McGreevey suggested that the financial strain of the growing criminal justice system is one reason for the bipartisan effort.

“Governors get this, because they can’t afford to do this,” he said. “If we’re going to spend $47,000 on a cell, but we don’t do anything on the way out, that’s stupid,” he said.

The two-day conference was organized by Students for Prison Education and Reform or SPEAR, a student group on Princeton’s campus that aims to educate students help to succeed in reform efforts and prisoners to succeed in the workplace.

One of the group’s initiatives has been to send roughly 100 Princeton students each week to tutor inmates at New Jersey correctional facilities. The conference was intended to educate interested students in a broad range of activism strategies, according to Joe Barrett, a senior at Princeton and one of the organizers of the event.

McGreevey said the activism such as that of Students for Prison Education and Reform is a missing piece in an accelerating reform effort.

“All of this is about having young people vested in changing their communities,” he said.

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