Ex-offenders of gun crimes may have as low as a one-in-50 chance of avoiding a return to prison.
That's the statistic that Philadelphia Probation Officer Claire Durkin uses to describe how many of her cases are successful in adopting a non-criminal life.
Of her current caseload of 48 ex-offenders, Durkin said that "maybe one has a chance [of avoiding re-incarceration]."
Durkin has worked as a probation and parole officer in Philadelphia for twelve years. She currently handles ex-offenders who have been tried in gun court for firearms charges.
Anthony Soliman, another probation officer, has a caseload of 180 ex-offenders. He gives five or six a decent chance of avoiding prison.
The story that these numbers tell reaches far beyond the desks of Durkin or Soliman. Of the 205 people arrested on murder charges in Philadelphia last year, 79 percent had at least one previous arrest. This data suggests that to a great degree, it is the ex-offender community in Philadelphia that is driving the city's rising murder rate.
In Durkin's eyes, the problem is that many of these ex-offenders should not be on the streets in the first place. She claims that Philadelphia judges are far too lenient in their sentencing.
"Philadelphia judges just don't want to send people to jail," said Durkin, who asserts that Philadelphia judges are notorious for ignoring sentencing guidelines. "There is a large percentage of judges in Philadelphia that do not sentence people to state guidelines. That s-t wouldn't fly with other counties."
Durkin said that of her 48 cases, only five or six "deserve to be on probation."
Paul Conway, who is the chief of the homicide unit in the Public Defender's Office, disputes the notion that sentencing is too lenient.
"I think lately, sentences have gone up," Conway said. "At least in Philadelphia, judges have lost a lot of discretion."
But Durkin's argument is bolstered by a 1999 study commissioned by the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission. The study found that "[Pennsylvania's] sentencing guidelines have the widest sentencing ranges of any state sentencing guideline system, and no limits are placed on the types of factors that judges might consider when departing from the guidelines."
The study said that "those offenders who were identified as the most serious offenders are the most likely to get a departure below the guidelines," and that within Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and Allegheny county judges were the most likely to depart from the guidelines.
Federal judges, on the other hand, have a record of giving much harsher sentences to firearms offenders in Philadelphia.
From 1999 through the end of February, 2006, the U.S. attorney's office had tried 2,016 people for firearms crimes, according to Robert Reed, the deputy chief of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Of those 2016, 1,736 were convicted, and the average sentence is over nine years without parole, Reed says.
"[The federal system] is a huge deterrent," Reed said. "But we handle only a small percentage of cases. To be fair, the state courts are facing 5,000 arrests, while we're taking 10 percent or less of their cases. People who don't come here can slide through the state system."
Even if sentences were made longer, that would not necessarily address the problem of ex-offenders committing crimes.
For ex-offenders in Philadelphia, there isn't a lack of options. "There are hundreds of community resources for ex-offenders," said Harriet Spencer, the director of planning in the Mayor's Office for the Reentry of Ex-Offenders.
Prisoners give faith-based programs the highest reviews, according to Spencer.
"There's no one variable for an ex-offender to succeed," she said. "But faith will ultimately play a huge part."
According to Durkin, an ex-offender's chances largely depend on the strength of his family connections.
"People are successful when they have an immediate family member who does not do drugs," she said. "[They need to] have emotionally healthy, stable individuals around them."
But for ex-offenders who come from Philadelphia's poor, minority communities, stable families are a rarity.
One of Durkin's cases, a 19-year-old who had been arrested for illegal possession of a handgun last year and received a sentence of three years on probation, said that his mother had taken his bail refund earlier that week in order to buy cocaine. He asked not to be identified out of fear of incriminating himself further.
"I started to realize she was addicted when I was nine or 10," the probationer said of his mother. "Later, when I started selling cocaine, I realized that that same smell was coming from her bedroom."
A 23-year-old probationer who had been arrested on firearms charges said that he had to move out of his neighborhood in North Philadelphia in order to avoid going back to prison or being shot.
"If I was [in North Philadelphia] I'd either kill or be killed," the probationer said. "So I went to the suburbs in Delaware County to live with my mom."
"It's most likely if I was down there, I'd still be into the same thing," he added. "You know who's packing, and I got to be on the same vibe as them."
That probationer thinks he will avoid jail now, saying that he has been successful in finding work. Durkin, his probation officer, said that she is "more optimistic about him than others."
Any solutions to the ex-offender problem, however, have the inherent flaw of addressing criminals after they've already committed at least one crime. In Reed's eyes, not enough is being done to uplift the most affected communities.
"The whole social aspect - we don't even begin to do what we need to do to provide service in the urban areas - that's a travesty and a scandal," he said.
