The number of parolees returning to Kansas prisons is as low as it’s been in at least a decade.

“It’s half of what it was in 2000,” said Department of Corrections spokesman Bill Miskell.

The decline, he said, stems from a recent willingness to sort through parolees’ troubles rather than automatically sending them back to prison.

“We certainly – because of the danger – don’t do that with everybody,” Miskell said. “But there are times when it’s to everybody’s benefit to work with the parolee rather than revoking them.”

The effort is credited with derailing persistent increases in the state’s inmate population and delaying the need to build another prison.

The number of parolees sent back to prison varies each month. But state record show that, on average, 121 parolees were sent back to prison each month for the past 11 months. That’s down from monthly averages of 178 in 2005, 191 in 2004 and 203 in 2003.

Previously, parolees were routinely sent back to prison for infractions as minor as missing appointments, being in a bar or staying out late.

“If we can work with them, keep them employed, keep them in a reasonable housing situation and on track to becoming a successful law-abiding person, it’s to everyone’s advantage,” Miskell said. “It increases safety, and we’re limiting our population as well.”

Parolees who commit crimes are sent back to prison, he said.

More help coming

The numbers are expected to drop even further next month when a new law gives drug offenders access to food stamps, job training and housing assistance.

Since 1996, felony drug offenders leaving prison have not been eligible for these and other services.

“It all goes back to the big welfare reform bill Congress passed in 1996. It said drug offenders weren’t eligible, but it gave states the option to opt out,” said Sister Therese Bangert, a Kansas Catholic Conference lobbyist who worked on the bill.

Thirty-eight states have dropped the provision. Kansas, Bangert said, was 39th.

Under the new law, drug offenders are required to be in or have completed a rehabilitation program.

“For people coming out of prison, re-entering society is difficult,” she said. “We should help them.”

Paul Goseland, 54, served 13 years in prison for cocaine possession before being paroled last year.

“I had a lot of family support when I got out. I was lucky,” said Goseland, of Wichita. “But even with that support, it was hard. I walked the streets for months, looking for employment. Once they find out you’ve been in prison, nobody’ll hire you.

“I lived with my brother. My overhead was minimal. And I still barely made it.”

Eventually, Goseland landed a job with a sheet-metal company. “I’m doing OK,” he said, noting he no longer lives with his brother.

Access to services, he said, would have eased his transition into society and lessened the strain on his family.

“Any kind of support would help,” Goseland said, “especially job training.”

A struggle for some

Drugs put Bea Magathan’s younger brother in prison for three and a half years.

“When he got out, my mother and I took him around to get help,” Magathan said. “We couldn’t believe (that) everywhere we went, as soon as they found out there was a drug offense on his record, they said he wasn’t eligible.

“My brother has been mentally ill since he was about 18. He’s 35 now. He has schizoaffective disorder. When he got out of prison, they gave him two weeks’ worth of medication, $100 and a pat on the back. How anybody expected him to make it is beyond me.”

Magathan, who lives in Emporia and is a graduate student at the School of Social Welfare at Kansas University, said her brother now lives in a trailer in Strong City.

“Because he’s mentally ill, he gets disability – about $500 a month,” she said. “But his rent is $325 and he has to pay for part of his medications, so he has no money. He’s stable, but my mother feeds him.

“If she wasn’t, he’d go right to a life of crime,” she said. “I don’t know that he’d have a choice.”

Magathan, 38, testified in favor of the new law. “I have an older brother (Maj. Gary Moore) who was killed in Iraq two years ago,” she said. “I just said how frustrating it was to have one brother die for his country and then see that same country treat my other brother – and my mother – the way it has.”