Where are they going?
About 2,000 of the 6,000 being released soon are being deported. Many others will be steered to traditional probation programs. Most have already been moved to halfway houses or home confinement over the past year, as their sentences were recalculated. Some will go to public or privately run programs that help prisoners ease back into society.
PHILADELPHIA – She was the queen of the “OK Corral,” a tot-toting grandmother who stepped up to rent out street corners and run the bustling cocaine trade in her north Philadelphia neighborhood after her 20-year-old son was gunned down.
By the time a younger son finished testifying against her in federal court in 1990, Myrna Suren was sent off to serve a life sentence. She was 41 years old.
Now 67, Suren will soon leave the federal prison in downtown Philadelphia where she has spent 25 years. She is one of the 6,000 drug felons set for release around Nov. 1 as part of a national effort to reduce what the U.S. Sentencing Commission now deems to be overly harsh – and expensive – drug laws enacted during the era’s “War on Drugs.”
A few hundred of those drug felons will be returning to Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, though local authorities had not been able to release any names by last week. The U.S. Justice Department said 150 will be returning to Tennessee, 107 to Alabama and 167 to Georgia.