Our prisons and prisoners

This is a quote of the week from Sojourners:

An exorbitant amount of money is dedicated to incarcerating people. There are ways you can go about reducing the number of people incarcerated. The best way to help them successfully integrate into society and become independent, law-abiding citizens is to make sure they get a job.

-- Nancy La Vigne, director of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, on state programs that help ex-convicts find jobs. (Source: The New York Times)

So why do we go out of our way, as a society, to keep former offenders from getting a job? Isn't that pretty much guaranteed to make it more likely that they will return to crime?
~~~