And what if Maryland correctional officials had notified the people of Woodbine, in western Howard County, that a few inmates might be working at the nearby Day's End horse rescue farm? You think the neighbors would have been delighted? Think they would have offered to bring over a picnic lunch?

It wasn't just "lack of notification" that caused the suspension of one of the state's few projects in supervised inmate work.

The people who complained about inmates at Day's End are human, and it is human to fear first and ask questions later. It's also second nature for a politician to jump at the slightest neigh from a constituent.

So a few people get upset at the concept of inmates being anywhere other than behind walls, and they call a politician, and the politician calls the corrections official and that pretty much kills the well-intentioned initiative.

This sort of thing happens all the time, particularly when the non-urban part of American society is asked, however indirectly, to shoulder some of the nation's "urban problems."

The record of the last 30 years shows lots of kicking and screaming whenever someone wanted to open a drug-treatment clinic beyond Baltimore's city limits — even though drug addiction crosses all boundaries and polls show a significant majority of Americans favor therapy over incarceration.

We heard howls when it was suggested that Baltimore's public housing projects be destroyed and their poor tenants accepted into the surrounding counties, should they choose to live there. And there were fears and sometimes full opposition expressed whenever someone wanted to open a group home for the mentally ill or developmentally disabled.

In 1990, a Cockeysville couple wanted to offer foster care for children born with AIDS, most of them orphans from Baltimore. The couple did not need special permission to do this, but they thought it prudent to "inform the community."

Big mistake.

Hundreds of "concerned neighbors" came out to a meeting in a school. They said they really admired what the couple wanted to do — they just wanted them to do it someplace else.

So the couple moved to another community, started taking in AIDS babies and didn't tell anyone.

That's the way most small businesses hire ex-offenders: They do it discreetly, without letting their customers or other workers know.

But bear in mind that only a relatively small number of employers ever give ex-offenders a second chance. As a consequence, thousands of ex-offenders are turned down for jobs every day because of their criminal records.

Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and author, believes the decades-long war on drugs, along with harsher jail sentences, have led to a "new Jim Crow," a de facto racial caste system that discriminates (in employment, in housing) against ex-offenders.

There's little that's correctional in our correctional systems; we don't prepare offenders to be law-abiding ex-offenders, and when they get out of prison, they face even more obstacles to successful re-entry. Too many politicians, some cynical and some just spineless, see nothing to gain from common-sense corrections reform and everything to gain from pandering to public fears.

The ease with which the neighbors of Day's End were able to get the inmate program suspended supports Ms. Alexander's claim.

The irony in the complaint from Woodbine, as in all complaints about such programs, is that thousands of inmates are among us already. They're just not wearing jumpsuits, and we don't call them inmates. We call them probationers, or parolees.

According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, at the end of 2008, one in every 31 adults in the United States was in a local jail or state or federal prison, or on parole or probation. That's 7.3 million people. Of that number, 70 percent were "supervised in the community," meaning on parole or probation.

In Maryland, between 13,000 and 15,000 adults come out of our crowded prisons annually, and more than half of those return to Baltimore. The other half goes elsewhere, some of them maybe even to Woodbine!

Of course, of the thousands who come out of prison each year, about half are back within three. If we want to break that dreary cycle, then we need to put corrections back into corrections and give those who seek it a second chance. It will make life better for them, better for the horses, better for all of us.

-o-

In Thursday's column, I erred in attributing to the late Grace Darin words she uttered in 1980, as a copy editor on the bygone Baltimore Evening Sun. In fact, Ms. Darin had retired from the newspaper by the time she made the comment.

Dan Rodricks' column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail: dan.rodricks@baltsun.com. http://www.twitter.com/Midday.