Andrew Jarecki

And I think a lot of the sort of tough on crime politicians will say, so you guys just want to let Jeffrey Dahmer out on the street?

Nobody thinks that.

Nobody really believes that.

People are saying, well, no, what we're saying is that people who are in prison for having entered an unoccupied building

probably never should have been in prison at all.

And the people who are in prison with good reason because they robbed somebody or something, we don't necessarily have to believe that those people can never, ever have a chance to come out of prison and be productive citizens.

You just have to take a nuanced view.

You can't just say, well, they're bad people and they're good people, especially because they've got so many bad people walking around and so many good people locked up and vice versa.

Yeah, I mean, you're right in a way that it's the root of it.

In some way, we sort of are privatizing it because, like in my neighborhood in New York, there's a group called the Doe Fund, which has been around for a couple decades, I think.

And they take guys who are –

who have had severe drug addiction have ended up in prison

and are released and have no starting place, as you were describing.

And they give them a bed, they give them a bank account where they give them a certain amount of money each week for working.

And it's not a huge amount of money, but it sort of is the first step toward even being able to sort of have a checkbook and be able to say, oh, okay, so I've got $100 and I've spent 50 and this is what I have left.

And they give them a job, which is they make deals with neighborhoods around New York for them to come and do like street cleaning and clean up the neighborhood.

And they give them a uniform, which is clean, and they put them out on the street with a big blue trash bucket and some functional broom and things like that.

And sometimes they'll put them out in pairs so that they can work in tandem.

And these neighborhoods become incredibly clean.

The guys stay in this facility for as long as they need to until they sort of get back on their feet.