Changing the lives of prisoners: a new agenda.

TODAY MORE THAN TWO MILLION people are incarcerated in state and federal prisons, 600,000 are released every year, and within three to rive years 50 to 60 percent return to prison for committing new crimes or for violating their conditional releases. This deplorable rate of recidivism results in many thousands of new crime victims, the public response to which could lead to another era of billions spent on new prisons.

In an ostensible effort to turn this situation around--to promote rehabilitation of inmates and reduction in recidivism--special faith-based prisons have sprung up over the past few years in California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and other states. And the Corrections Corporation of America, which privately runs prisons for governments, has also jumped on the religious bandwagon. Funding for these programs, however, comes from state revenues distributed directly or indirectly to sectarian religious organizations. Because of this, such efforts engender obvious church-state entanglements. But there are problems with program effectiveness as well.

For example, despite reported rehabilitation successes, not all prisoners are eligible to participate. In effect, only those most likely to change need apply, such as medium- to low-risk drug offenders. Thus we see millions of U.S. tax dollars being routed through religious organizations to salvage the lives of only a select few while doing little to change the lives of the vast majority of inmates, most of whom will eventually be released with or without some form of supervision.

Beyond this, the much-touted positive outcomes are, at least in part, a product of counting the winners and ignoring the losers. "Graduating" from a faith-based program is often defined not only as sticking with a demanding course over a number of months but also getting a job after release. Since getting a job is itself among the most reliable predictors of a former inmate staying out of trouble, then the "proven" success of graduates has been demonstrated largely with circular logic. Participants who drop out, are kicked out, or who get early parole and don't finish usually aren't counted in program statistics at all.

Because of all this, existing faith-based prisons offer insufficient evidence that "a Christ-centered biblically-based program" designed to root out sin is more effective than secular programs that use a therapeutic model of creating and restoring human relationships. Indeed, a number of secular approaches have well-documented success rates. So, if society wants to dramatically reduce the amount of serious crimes and social havoc perpetrated by former state and federal inmates, a new and more inclusive agenda is needed for changing lives and reducing recidivism.

OPINION POLLS OF THE LAST SEVERAL years on crime and punishment in the United States demonstrate the consensus that two major consequences should occur in the lives of convicted criminals who are sentenced to prison. First, that the duration of their loss of freedom in society is for most of the sentence in real calendar time; and second, upon release they are "better" people. Increased prison capacity and the implementation of truth in sentencing are approximating the first demand. Presumably, a better person is understood to mean one whose thinking has been redirected or transformed during incarceration and who, following release, will be equipped to resist any temptation to return to a life of crime. There are no fairies to distribute magic wands to prison administrators to wave over the heads of inmates immediately prior to their release that will sprinkle virtue dust on them and transform them into better people.

The research data of the same opinion polis inform us that the "vast majority" of Americans believe that most prison inmates are capable of changing into law-abiding members of society and should during their incarceration be given a significant variety of opportunities for change. Therefore, a massive infusion of new funding into the annual budgets of the prison and parole components of all state and federal agencies is needed. Such prison program expenditures should be restricted to the following:

   The creation and expansion of general educational
   programs culminating in General
   Education Diplomas and high school diplomas
   and the creation and expansion of
   college and university programs in which
   inmates can earn undergraduate and graduate
   degrees. Though many, if not most,
   Americans have mixed feelings or are opposed
   to helping finance college or university
   degrees for prison inmates, the benefits
   of higher education for those who are capable
   is grounded in the research data of numerous
   evaluations,  all  of which verify that the
   recidivism rate of those who complete these
   programs is significantly less than for inmates
   who are released with lesser or no educational
   accomplishments. Of course, inmate opportunities
   shouldn't take anything away from
   any ordinary person who meets the eligibility
   criteria for educational grants and loans. In
   this connection, Congress should introduce
   legislation enabling prison inmates to receive
   Pell grants, which were previously discontinued
   when many in Congress were duped
   into believing that multitudes of needy and
   law-abiding citizens were being denied these
   grants because of awards to prison inmates.

      The creation and expansion of vocational
   programs, the completion of which would
   qualify inmates for good-paying employment
   in numerous blue-collar professions.

   The creation and expansion of counseling
   programs, staffed by well-qualified people,
   designed to meet the needs of those inmates
   with any substance abuse problem or psychological
   or psychiatric issue.

   The creation and expansion of visitation
   opportunities for families of inmates in
   order to strengthen and reestablish bonds
   of affection and support, which are of vital
   importance for successful reentry into
   communities.

Just doing these things will go a long way toward more effectively promoting the rehabilitation of inmates and a reduction in recidivism.

THEN IT'S TIME TO "think outside the box." With the aim of increasing the number of opportunities for all inmates eligible for release to participate in education programs capable of igniting the desire and strength of will to become a better person, a commitment should be made to Project Habilitation or Changing Lives through Literature.

Project Habilitation entails the abandonment of the "myth of rehabilitation" in favor of a much more accurate account of the thinking and behavioral habits of the majority of prison inmates. The universally accepted definition of rehabilitation is to restore a person to a former state of good health or a useful and constructive purpose. But most of the people in our prisons have never developed habits of thinking and conduct conducive to living a law-abiding life. Instead, they think and act as if they and their immediate desires are the center of the universe around which all human life revolves. It would therefore be a serious mistake to rehabilitate them. Habilitation, by contrast, is the civilizing, educational, and life-transforming experience caused by the power of knowledge to grab a human mind and redirect the course of a person's life. More specifically, habilitation is a "spiritual conversion" to thinking and acting in compliance with the cardinal requirement of an ethical life: namely, that our civil society is a moral community in which all members are entitled to certain human rights and are bound by the obligation to respect the rights of others.

Changing Lives through Literature is a bold experiment that can be used as a paradigm for creating similar programs in both state and federal prisons. It was designed in 1991 by Robert Waxler, a professor of English literature at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, and Robert Kane, a district court judge in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to serve as a sentencing option for recalcitrant male probationers facing the prospect of a prison sentence. Waxler made the highly unconventional request that the court "send a group of eight to ten of those bad guys to me at the university and I will introduce them to the transformative power of some of the great works of literature" Kane embraced the challenge and "go to school and read books or go to jail" became a new choice for some probationers in New Bedford. In 1992, following a meeting with Waxler and Kane, Jean Trounstine, a professor of humanities at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, Massachusetts, with the enthusiastic support of District Court Judge Joseph Dever, instituted a similar program for female probationers.

The probationers selected for these programs aren't creamed from the group most likely to succeed but must demonstrate an eighth-grade reading level. The texts for the men's classes include The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, and Animal Farm by George Orwell. The texts for the women's classes include The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Their Eyes Were Watching Goal by Zora Neale Hurston.

During its fourteen-year history this genuine revolution in criminal justice has spread to a significant number of other states, as well as to Canada and the United Kingdom. This is due largely to the indisputable findings of independent evaluations that numerous lives have been redirected in a crime-free path as a direct result of reading and discussing powerful presentations of the issues and questions endemic to the human condition. Qualified scholars in the humanities can assemble a long list of significant readings accessible to the mental abilities of most of the people incarcerated in our state and federal prisons.

The successful implementation of these new initiatives, however, will require major changes in how we use some of our existing prison facilities, the criteria for the employment and retention of correctional officers, and the creation of new policies designed to reward inmates for good conduct and the completion of educational and vocational programs.

First, most prisons are extremely noisy places. Some of them, and large sections of others, should be transformed into education units in which inmates are housed and can work, learn, and study in a quiet environment. Second, we must follow the lead of those who are working to transform the culture of correctional staff into a real profession, requiring some post high school education and entitlement to higher annual salaries. Third, it is totally unrealistic to expect masses of inmates to decide to become better people in the absence of a substantial incentive. This is where we have another opportunity to "think outside the box" by initiating a bold plan to satisfy legitimate grievances of parole-eligible inmates and maintain protection of the public interest.

INMATES ARE MORE LIKELY TO embrace educational and vocational programs and behave with civility if the following information is given to them in written form and fully explained during their orientation and evaluation as incoming prisoners:

   Every inmate, upon reaching eligibility for
   parole, is entitled to a public hearing administered
   by a three-member panel of parole
   commissioners. This panel will allow oral and
   written testimony from all parties in favor of
   or against the granting of parole. This means
   that victims and prosecutors will appear in
   some cases to protest the release of a violent
   and dangerous person. It also means that witnesses
   for the inmate--for example, spouses,
   children, parents, clergy, and teachers--will
   be given time to state why they are urging the
   panel to grant parole. Inmates shall have the
   right to address the panel from the witness
   stand in order to explain their accomplishments
   and how they have changed subsequent
   to incarceration. Inmates shall have the right
   to retain counsel to prepare their case and to
   guide them through their testimony.

Any decision by the panel of parole commissioners would require two votes. Immediately following the admission of all testimony in a case, the members may vote and explain their judgment in the open hearing, or they may decide to take the matter under advisement for a period not to exceed thirty days. The hearing would then be reconvened, at which time each panel member would explain her or his vote to the inmate. This procedure is nearly equivalent to the inmate's trial at which evidence was presented, guilt was confessed or determined, and a sentence was imposed. In short, the critically important function of this procedure is that it steers clear of a nondiscretionary, mandatory release of inmates judged to be a continuing threat to society and encourages the decision makers to grant release to numerous inmates who, in the panel's judgment, have reached or are on their way to habilitation.

In this connection, state governors will need to resist the temptation to appoint their own cronies to these important positions in the administration of criminal justice. Parole commissioners should be assigned a caseload with a minimum-maximum range and this become the benchmark for determining the number of such positions in every state. The mini mum qualifications for appointment should be a four year degree from an accredited college or university, a documented knowledge of criminal justice, and a reputation for possessing the courage to express one's beliefs in a public forum. Appointments should be for a term of rive years and eligibility restricted to two successive terms. These positions would be full time and earn an annual salary commensurate with responsibilities.

WITH THESE RECOMMENDATIONS, however, the fact remains that some of the 600,000 people released annually from prisons are going to commit more crimes and spit defiantly in the face of any new policies and programs. There are no silver bullets armed with a guarantee to habilitate all of them. But we must not allow this grim and inevitable reality to derail our determination to stay the course. The inmates who complete counseling and vocational and education programs, and are nearing release, must be the focus of attention of the agencies charged with preparing them for reentry and with supervision following their release.

Of interest in this regard is the fact that Texas is the birthplace of a paradigm that should be replicated and funded in every state and federal jurisdiction that supervises ex-offenders. It was in 1985 that a two-city experiment called Project RIO, the reintegration of offenders, was launched. The mission of this ambitious and optimistic state program was and is to provide job preparation services to prison inmates in order to give them a head start in the post-release search for employment. The project has been funded entirely by the state's general revenues and "represents an unusual collaboration between two state agencies ... the Texas Workforce Commission (the state's employment agency) and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (Institutional and Parole Divisions)" And from its small beginning to the present, Project RIO has established a track record of assisting and finding employment for thousands of ex-offenders, documented a significantly lower recidivism rate than comparable groups of non-participants, and saved the state millions of real tax dollars.

Given the publicly verified accomplishments of Project RIO and the potential for nationwide replication, there should be a national commitment to fund and a sufficient number of professional and support staff to:

* provide a comprehensive job readiness orientation for all prison inmates within three to six months of their release

* recruit and train a legion of non-paid volunteers to serve as mentors to inmates prior to and after their release

* contact and recruit corporations, companies, and small business operations willing to hire ex-offenders

* support changes in federal and state legislation to increase tax credits for those who hire ex-offenders.

The lure of federal dollars, many tied to matching grants, should be used to entice the majority of states to set in motion the guts of this new agenda.

Beyond the reintegration of the newly released comes the reintegration of the previously released. Toward this latter end, a governmental commission needs to be created--composed of some of the nations most influential scholars in constitutional law, jurisprudence, criminal justice, and the humanities--with marching orders to make some realistic recommendations for eliminating most of the numerous barriers or collateral consequences preventing millions of former prison inmates from being eligible to receive assistance from a variety of state and federal programs. And they would also make recommendations regarding the timely restoration of the civil and political rights of the former prison inmates.

THE GOAL OF EVERYTHING DISCUSSED here is simply to protect the lives and property of law-abiding citizens. This new agenda isn't based on the false belief that the majority of criminal offenders are victims of a sick society or some psychological illness and therefore actually deserve all the programs and services advocated. There is nothing here to throb a bleeding heart. There is no assumption that everyone, deep down inside, is basically a good person. Rather the motivation, plain and simple, is the public interest. This new agenda is purely practical. Thus it holds the promise of bipartisan support.

Compare this with the idealistic, unrealistic, impractical, and ideologically driven notion that sectarian faith is the answer. And understand that this new agenda requires no violation of or amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, it is consistent with the proud tradition of "American knowhow," "Yankee ingenuity," and that "can-do" spirit of rolling up one's sleeves to "get the job done."

Lawrence Thomas Jablecki holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Manchester University in Manchester, England, and since 1989 has taught undergraduate and masters philosophy classes to hundreds of prison inmates at the Ramsey I prison unit in Rosharon, Texas, for the University of Houston at Clear Lake. In the spring of 2006 at Rice University in Houston he will teach an upper level undergraduate course on The Criminal Justice System. Previously he spent twenty-five years in the adult probation department in Angleton, Texas, the last eighteen as director. His writings have appeared previously in the Humanist.