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U.S. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin breezed through Rockville on Monday, touring the Montgomery County Pre-Release Center and the Reginald S. Lourie Center for Infants and Young Children.
Cardin's stop at the pre-release center was a fact-finding visit in preparation for a Senate subcommittee hearing on reducing recidivism that he will lead Thursday.
Cardin's tour included a look at the center's dormitory-style rooms, classrooms and a career center that gives offenders access to computers and telephones for finding jobs.
He also held a discussion with county corrections officials and staff of the pre-release center and a closed-door meeting with offenders.
The center houses 162 offenders and serves 19 more who are in home confinement. It deals with both those who are within a year of release from the county's jail and prisoners from the state and federal correctional systems who are within six months of release and will be returning to the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
Offenders work with staff to develop individualized re-entry plans for work, housing, medical care and substance abuse treatment when needed.
Some 85 percent to 90 percent of offenders leave the center with jobs, said Stefan LoBuglio, chief of the county's Pre-release and Reentry Services, who will testify at Thursday's hearing in Washington.
"Re-entry makes sense," he said. "It enhances public safety. It enhances community well-being. It's not just a matter of dollars, it's a matter of leadership, and it's a matter of collaboration more than anything else."
Cardin's second stop included a tour of the center and a lighthearted Q&A with the Lourie Center School's 26 students.
The school serves children ages 4 through 12 with emotional disabilities who have been referred from public school systems after the special education programs offered there did not fit their needs.
Most of the students come from Montgomery County schools.
"We have proven consistently over an extensive period of time [that] 90 percent of the students that come to the Lourie Center School and receive services here, when they graduate they go to a less restrictive level of care," Marcel Wright, the center's interim executive director, told Cardin during a briefing on the programs offered by the center. "Many of those children go directly back to the public school system."
Cardin told Wright not to be discouraged if that message does not reach elected officials who hold the purse strings to funding for the center, which relies on grants and donations from family foundations and individual donors to cover costs for some programs.
School systems often are reluctant to place students in nonpublic settings.
"They're not picking on you, it's a general problem," said Cardin, whose wife, Myrna, once led the state organization that represents nonpublic special education facilities like the Lourie Center. "The best you can do is get your local policymakers out here to see what you're doing — the council and the state legislators — because it is a political problem within the school system."
