I was working in an office that is now called the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments (a national membership organization of elected and appointed officials) when I first began hearing from administrators of these diverse organizations. They were meeting as members of a "Reentry Policy Council" convened by CSG to hammer out consensus-based recommendations to address post-incarceration challenges at a community level. These committed men and women from very different walks of life and points on the political spectrum discussed hundreds of ideas and examples to identify the most promising. We collected them into a comprehensive report, which served as a reentry playbook for government and community leaders, and an important template for the Second Chance Act.

In his January 2004 State of the Union address, President Bush described prisoner reentry as a pressing problem - one of the few domestic policy issues that he mentioned - and proposed "a new prisoner re-entry initiative based on expanding job training and placement services, providing transitional housing, and helping newly released prisoners get mentoring, including from faith-based groups." Representatives Rob Portman (R-OH) and Danny Davis (D-IL) responded to this call, and the needs of their constituents, by introducing the first version of the Second Chance Act in June 2004.

Up to that point, the movement of the idea from grass-roots to Capitol Hill seemed to me a straightforward expression of the democratic process, America's leaders responding with action in an hour of need. But the deeper past and the future were murkier.

Read Part III: More on elected officials and the SCA.