Last week Attorney General Eric Holder spoke at the Vera Institute of Justice’s Third Annual Justice Address, an annual meeting featuring a prominent national figure who explores important justice issues of our time. In his remarks, Holder outlined the Department of Justice’s agenda for reducing crime rates and the cost of incarceration, issues that he characterized as the Department’s main concerns.

“To begin with, high rates of incarceration have tremendous social cost,” Holder said. “And, of course, there also is the matter of simple dollars and cents, and the principle of diminishing marginal returns. Every state in the union is trying to trim budgets. States and localities are laying off teachers and canceling sanitation department shifts, but in almost all cases, spending on prisons continues to increase. Not only is this unsustainable economically, but it is also not proving to be effective at fighting crime. For while prison building and prison spending continue to increase, public safety is not improving. Since 2003, spending on incarceration has continued to rise, but crime rates have flattened. Indeed, crime rates appear to have reached a plateau, and no longer respond to increases in incarceration.”

The article went on to say, “… Holder emphasized the need for including prisoner rehabilitation in the strategy for reducing the cost of incarceration. Residential drug abuse treatment programs, which are said to result in a 16 percent lower likelihood of re-arrest, were at the top of his list of reforms. “We know that offenders who have participated in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ residential drug abuse treatment program are less likely to be re-arrested, have their supervision revoked, and be returned to prison, than similar inmates who did not receive such treatment before their reentry into society. They are also less likely to use drugs once released.”

Another initiative Holder mentioned as helpful would be to “provide more work for inmates. Inmates who work in prison industries are 24 percent less likely to commit crimes again, compared to inmates who have not participated in such programs – which, incidentally, operate at no cost to the taxpayer,” he said.

Holder also stated that the Bureau of Prisons’ educational programs, which are designed to address educational deficiencies ranging from Adult Basic Education to high school level classes are also effective in reducing recidivism.”

Based on my years of work in the reentry field, I can unequivocally state that Holder has it exactly right: Work experience and education are the two main areas prison officials should be focusing on if society wants to reduce the costs of incarceration in America. The real question is, do we want to save money or do we want to continue Draconian punishment policies that are often counterproductive? Certainly dangerous people should be locked up, but we also lock up people who pose no danger … people we’re just mad at.

By way of example, a number of men are set to go to prison as a result of the countywide bribery scandal; men who have real skills in the building trades. Part of their “punishment” should be to teach unskilled felons some of those skills and prepare them for work upon their release.

I’m not calling for “Hug-A-Thug” programs, but logic would seem to dictate that any sane person would want people exiting prison to be able to find work so they don’t remain tax-takers, and instead become taxpayers. Nonetheless, close to two decades ago Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutcheson pushed a bill though Congress that denies Pell Grants for prisoners, in spite of the hard evidence that recidivism goes down in direct proportion to the amount of education a prisoner acquires while behind bars. If costs are a concern, then give prisoners a loan, repayable after they are out and gainfully employed; but to deny them the opportunity to gain some marketable skills while incarcerated is pure folly on our part.

And our folly is costing us dearly. We were set to cut back on library funding so that we could continue to keep petty drug dealers locked up. Why? Because we’ve been letting mean-spirited conservatives drive prison policy in America, and drive us off a budgetary cliff in the process.

Speaking of employment, I’ve recently been involved in a green jobs program initiated by a local institution of higher learning (and funded by a couple of local foundations), and, while the pilot has hit some minor bumps in the road, the program could become a national model for putting guys with prior felony convictions to work. Not all of the participants of the program were formerly incarcerated, but those that had felony convictions were every bit as dedicated as those who had no history of incarceration — it was as if they had something to prove — and they did. If prisons were doing a better job of teaching the math skills required to enter the green jobs economy, success would come much easier and faster for the formerly incarcerated.

The main roadblock to successful prisoner reentry has, without question, been employment. With the 2008 Second Chance Act in place, and new leadership from Washington on this issue (I know this will infuriate some Progressives, but Bush was far better than Clinton in terms of attempting to institute sane reentry policies, but it was his own Republican Party that torpedoed many of his efforts) there is a real chance that we can now make substantial progress on a couple of fronts.

As Van Jones (President Obama’s new green jobs czar) called for in his book “The Green Collar Economy” we can address two of the more pressing issues of our time with one solution: Breaking our dependence on foreign energy by going green, and lowering our tax bill by putting formerly incarcerated person to work doing jobs few others are eager to do. That’s a two-fer, a construct in which everybody wins … especially taxpayers.