A prison is the last place you might expect to hear a bark, but in three Texas correctional facilities, you’ll regularly hear barks, commands and the pitter-patter of paws.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice partnered with Patriot Paws, a nonprofit that pairs disabled veterans with service dogs. Before the dogs are paired with a vet, incarcerated individuals train them to learn basic service animal skills.
The pairing between Patriot Paws and prisons is mutually beneficial. The trainers learn valuable life lessons and gain skills that can lead to career opportunities post-release, and the dogs learn how to care for a vet.
Since starting the partnership in 2008, Patriot Paws has hired two formerly-incarcerated dog trainers.
Meet one of the trainers and learn how you can get involved with Patriot Paws in the video above.
More: People in Prisons Are Learning to Code — and It Might Alter the Course of Their Lives
Tag: prison
Rape Behind Bars: Stopping the Cycle of Violence
Nicole Wolfe was just two months into her life sentence for attempted murder when she says a lieutenant at the Central California Women’s Facility began raping her. About six months later, in the fall of 1998, a nurse at the prison also began sexually assaulting her.
It was hell for Wolfe, who was assaulted continuously for a year while she was at the California prison.
In 2000, Wolfe was transferred to a different prison. There, she met with a counselor and for the first time was able to process all of the abuse she’d faced over the years. She says the counselor, Debora Heaps, changed her life — because Heaps believed her story.
“She was just so open and receptive and gentle and understanding, and had so much information, too,” Wolfe tells NationSwell. “She made me feel like a human… It was like she opened up a path to recovery for the first time in my life. I could see my life could be different, and better.”
Wolfe is hardly alone in having experienced sexual assault while behind bars. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that four percent of adult inmates in jails and prisons had reported a sexual assault, and about half of those instances of assault were from corrections staff. Mapping that data over the total incarcerated population of the U.S., it’s estimated that 200,000 imprisoned people endure sexual assault each year.
Through the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which passed in 2003, detention facilities are partnering with their local rape crisis centers to provide support services to incarcerated populations. Those services can take the form of access to a rape crisis hotline, the ability to write letters to rape crisis centers or receive in-person counseling, much like Wolfe was able to receive from Heaps. And counselors like Heaps can accompany inmates to forensic exams if they decide to report an assault.
AN AMBITIOUS BILL
When President George W. Bush signed PREA into law, it was intended to curb the thousands of reported cases of sexual misconduct — a problem that advocates describe as an epidemic — and to establish grants for nonprofits to aid in eliminating rape in prisons.
PREA, though ambitious, was an aspirational piece of legislation that required deep and time-consuming analyses of inmate conditions. And so prison rapes continued: Four years after the bill was passed, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that an estimated 70,000 people were abused in prisons the previous year.
In 2013, the Department of Justice updated PREA with a set of standards that required prisons and jails to provide inmates with access to outside counseling or emotional support services. Private and public prisons, local jails, juvenile detention centers, immigrant detention centers, and community corrections facilities must now provide access to outside emotional support services to any inmate who is sexually assaulted in prison and to inmates who experienced past sexual assaults.
Women who face sexual harassment in detention have often faced it before: 86 percent of women in jail report experiencing sexual violence prior to incarceration, according to a 2016 study by the nonprofit research and policy organization Vera Institute of Justice.
But women often don’t come forward about their assaults.
In 1995, only a quarter of U.S. women reported incidents of sexual abuse to police. And even though that number increased to 59 percent in 2005, reports dropped dramatically back to 1990s levels by 2010, according to a 2016 Bureau of Justice Statistics report.
Karin Stone, director of client services for Women’s Center High Desert, says people who experience sexual abuse as children or repeated sexual assault usually turn to crime as a coping mechanism.
“If you start to, we call it ‘peel the onion,’ you discover those layers of trauma,” says Stone. “It amazes me sometimes that they’ve survived as long as they have.”
The pattern — abuse, trauma, crime — is one that Stone says will continue to repeat itself even after inmates leave prison if they never receive therapy or learn healthy coping mechanisms.
The quality of support services for incarcerated survivors varies widely across the U.S., but recent data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that the PREA may be having a positive effect in that more inmates are reporting sexual assault. In 2011, correctional administrators received 8,768 reports of sexual misconduct from inmates. In 2015, that number more than tripled to 24,661 reports.
“You would think that more reports [mean] a rise in incidents,” says Jesse Lerner-Kinglake, communications director at Just Detention International (JDI), an organization devoted to ending sexual abuse behind bars. “But in fact the most important thing that it tells us is that people are coming forward, which is what we want.”
“I WAS LIVING MY WORST NIGHTMARE”
Wolfe says she was first sexually assaulted by a family member when she was only 4 years old. She was assaulted again during her youth and also as a young adult. Part of the problem, she says, is that she grew up in a family where nobody knew what was going on behind closed doors, which is why no one tried to stop the abuse.
“I didn’t know anything different,” she says, adding that sexual abuse “was just a given” in her life.
But abuse tends to follow people throughout their lives.
In 1997, Wolfe says she felt trapped in an abusive marriage, and tried to kill her then-husband in what she described as a desperate act to escape the cycle of abuse. “I couldn’t get away,” she says. “I couldn’t see my way out.” She was sentenced to life in prison for attempted murder. It was only when she was locked up behind bars that she says she finally felt safe.
But that feeling of safety wouldn’t last. Within her first year of incarceration, Wolfe says she was raped by a prison lieutenant. She was afraid to report him because he had power and influence over her life in prison. On Sundays, he ran the gate that inmates had to go through to see visitors, and he would assault her before she went through the gates before her visits. “I would go to my visits just…out of my mind,” says Wolfe. “I was afraid to say anything to anybody because I was serving a life sentence. Nobody ever believed me. Why [would] they believe me now?”
Wolfe felt like she couldn’t trust any of the psychologists who worked for the prison. When she did finally seek care, she was abused yet again by a nurse on staff. For six months, she was repeatedly assaulted by both the lieutenant and the nurse.
“I thought, I’m supposed to be here for the rest of my life, and is this the rest of my life?” she says. “I was living in my worst nightmare.”
Wolfe says the nurse who assaulted her was eventually caught by a prison official and convicted of sex with a confined person. Wolfe then took a risk and told a prison psychologist “in confidence” about the lieutenant, but the psychologist reported it to the prison, and another investigation began. Wolfe doesn’t know the outcome of that investigation.
NationSwell requested records for both the lieutenant and the nurse, but neither were provided by the time of publication. A spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) confirmed that the nurse worked for the prison, but said the department could not comment on any investigation. CDCR sent NationSwell the following statement regarding investigations into both the nurse and the lieutenant:
“We can’t speak to the specific allegations mentioned here, but staff sexual misconduct is an issue we take very seriously. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) maintains a zero tolerance for staff sexual misconduct, and thoroughly investigates all allegations. If an investigation proves there was wrongdoing, CDCR staff may face disciplinary action and/or referral for criminal prosecution.”
In 2000, Wolfe was transferred to California Institution for Women, a state prison. It was there where Wolfe met Heaps for the first time. Heaps, who is now the director of programs at Riverside Area Rape Crisis Center, was one of the first counselors sent into prisons to provide in-person therapy to inmates who had been sexually assaulted, and also to inmates who had faced sexual harassment prior to their incarceration.
“From the very beginning, it was like there was someone I could really be completely honest with and feel like I had complete confidentiality,” Wolfe says.
ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE OF HELP
An increase in allegations doesn’t mean an increase in justice for survivors. Of the more than 24,000 allegations of sexual violence from inmates in 2015, only 1,473 were substantiated by investigations, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report released this past July.
“It shows that the investigations are failing,” says Lerner-Kinglake. “It’s simply not believable that the overwhelming majority of people are making it up or that there wasn’t enough evidence.”
Though there’s no research that proves access to counseling and emotional support helps incarcerated survivors of sexual assault, other rehabilitative programs in prisons and jails have proven to successfully reduce recidivism.
A May 2018 White House report found that mental health programs and substance abuse programs reduce recidivism by 21 percent and 17 percent, respectively. And a number of reports have found that therapy reduces PTSD and anxiety for survivors of rape who aren’t incarcerated.
In lieu of empirical evidence, advocates also point to the experiences they’re having every day with survivors in detention.
Jennifer Jeanquart, a prison rape crisis advocate who works for Sexual Trauma Services of the Midlands in six men’s detention facilities in South Carolina, shared a letter she received from one of the clients she counseled.
“I don’t know where I would be if it was not for you. I can never thank you enough for the help you gave me,” the letter reads. “I’ll always remember you, Mrs. J. You have inspired me to help other people like myself.”
Jessica Seipel, program director at JDI, also wrote letters to a survivor named Joe Booth, who says he was raped by his cellmate. Booth later told Seipel that she was the first person who asked him his name. Staff at the prison had previously only called him by his inmate number. Seipel says she was just doing her job and supporting a survivor, but “little did I know that for this person…my letters were like a lifeline for him that saved his life.”
Heaps says none of her clients ever blamed other people for the crimes they committed, but that counseling helped them discover what led them down that path.
“Trauma is a very complex thing,” Heaps says. “If not processed through counseling and therapy, it can lead down a very dark path of vulnerability and victimization.”
Heaps and Wolfe worked together for more than a year, and Wolfe says that it completely changed her life. In 2013, she was released from prison after multiple appeals to the parole board. She says Heaps gave her the “tool box” she needed to break free of the cycles that led to her abuse.
“If I hadn’t been able to figure out how to live my life without being abused, and if I hadn’t found my voice, then I’d never be where I am today,” Wolfe says. “I could very easily be back in an abusive relationship, killed by an abusive man, or cowering somewhere, afraid of my own shadow. And I’m not.”
To Relieve Ohio’s Overcrowded Jails, Rethink Who Goes in Them
On a recent afternoon at the city hall in Toledo, Ohio, Holly Matthews is teaching her colleagues some slang. “I forgot to tell everyone my new word of the day,” she says. “It’s ‘pookie.’” A pookie, Matthews explains, is another word for a crack pipe. “I checked with Urban Dictionary,” she says, chuckling.
Matthews is executive director of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, an agency that provides criminal justice information services to residents of Lucas County in Northwest Ohio. She is also one of a dozen members of the county’s Population Review Team, an interagency group that seeks ways of reducing or eliminating jail time for new or low-level offenders, with the goal of reducing incarceration rates in Lucas County’s overburdened jails. (Matthews’ “pookie” was in a case file she was reviewing, found by police in the pocket of a man who was arrested after a domestic dispute.)
The atmosphere in the room can be lighthearted, but the Population Review Team’s work is serious business — especially in Toledo, Lucas’ county seat, where reducing incarceration rates is sorely needed. The county’s jail is designed to hold only pretrial inmates, but it is being overburdened by too many people waiting to see a judge. In 2014, a U.S. Federal judge ordered the county to cap its jail population, which had a capacity of 346 beds. Two years after the cap was set, the jail’s population has been reduced to 667 people — down from 845 in 2016 — for the first quarter this year, according to Matthews.
To try and address these issues of overcrowding, the Population Review Team meets once a week to review the county’s jail cases to find ways to reduce bail, alter criminal offenses and, in some cases, eliminate or reduce jail time completely.
Toledo isn’t alone in dealing with overcrowded jails.
Nationally, jail populations have been steadily rising, contributing to high incarceration rates throughout the country. Daily local jail populations swelled from 157,000 in 1970 to over 700,000 people in 2015. Annually, there are close to 11 million admissions into jails, according to data collected by the Vera Institute of Justice.
“It’s become a crisis because as we’ve added laws that impose mandatory sentencing,” says Gene A. Zmuda, a common pleas court judge for Lucas County. “We are incarcerating more and more of our population.”
For those on the Population Review Team — along with Matthews, the group includes local correction officers and defense attorneys — this means reviewing rap sheets to determine if there are ways to release inmates without putting the public at risk, such as increased usage of electronic monitoring.
In other cases, plea deals are brokered, according to Sean McNulty, chief public defender for the Toledo Legal Aid Society and an original member of the review team. Candidates who are deemed “good” — those with misdemeanor charges or nonviolent crimes — can have their bail modified or their case expedited or, in some cases, they are simply set free.
Zmuda invokes an example of a first-time drug user. “Maybe jail isn’t the right place for that person,” he says. “Send them to rehabilitation and break the cycle of addiction.”
The program started in 2016, after the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded the county a $2 million grant directing local mental-health organizations to partner with law enforcement officials, with the intent to “institute changes aimed at reducing local incarceration and disparities in jail usage in accordance with its implementation plan.”
Over the course of an afternoon, the team isolates about a dozen defendants in custody whose charges will be reviewed. During a recent meeting, McNulty and John Madigan, the city’s prosecutor, were able to agree to several resolutions for a handful of people who were sitting in the county’s jail. The negotiations included a reduced charge, credit for time served and a probation term.
According to Matthews, this comprehensive collaboration and review reduced 1,800 jail days in total for 2017. And while the jail’s population isn’t as low as officials want it to be, they point to the reductions they’ve made in the past two years, by almost two hundred inmates in total.
“Jail buildup happened over 40 years and it won’t be solved in just a year or two,” says Patrick Griffin, the senior program officer for the MacArthur Foundation.
Along with the review board meetings, Lucas County officials have implemented four other strategies — such as training cops to identify alternatives to arrests or keeping people with mental health issues out of jail — to help in reducing the county’s jail population.
And as the initiative continues, Griffin hopes that solutions like the ones being implemented in Lucas County will spread to other parts of the state, and beyond.
“It will take success and then practitioners will take notice,” he says. “We have to increase demand among citizens for jail reform.”
Zmuda, McNulty and others believe that the next important step will be addressing the overrepresentation of minors in the system, along with keeping substance abusers from getting swept into the jail.
“We’re holding fewer — and holding the right — people,” says Zmuda. “We have right-sized our jail.”
At This Prison, Puppies and Inmates Give Each Other Purpose
At this women’s prison in upstate New York, puppies are proving to be more than just woman’s best friend.
“They make you feel like you’re worth something,” says Dunasha Payne, an inmate at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. “And they make you wake up every day, that you have a purpose in life and that you’re not just a prisoner.”
Payne is part of Puppies Behind Bars, a program that teaches inmates to train puppies as service animals for veterans and first responders suffering from PTSD. Not only do the dogs bring comfort to the people they serve, but the inmates participating in the program are “the most well-behaved” in the prison, according to one guard. Watch the video above and read our full article to see how Puppies Behind Bars is making a difference for people in and out of prison.
These Dogs Are Giving Inmates a Paws-itive Path Forward
Charlene Mess was having a bad dream. At least, she was acting like she was.
As she rocked back and forth, screaming and moaning, her dog, Champ, shot his head up and leapt into action. He pulled off Mess’ sheets and flicked on the room’s lights with his wet nose. It took him a few tries, but when he finally switched it on, there was thunderous applause.
Champ was demonstrating his latest trick in front of a room of dog trainers, who also happen to be inmates at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison for women in New York, about an hour north of Manhattan.
“Good boy!” Mess said, jumping up from her makeshift bed, which in reality was a long table, as she fed Champ treats from a kibble pouch that she had belted over her prison uniform.
The flipping-on-the-light trick was just one of many that Champ showed off during a recent class at Bedford Hills, where he and Mess participate in Puppies Behind Bars (PBB). The New York–based nonprofit, which operates in six correctional facilities and works with about 140 prisoners, trains inmates to raise service dogs for wounded veterans and first-responders suffering from trauma-related disorders. They also raise and train explosive-detection canines (EDCs) for law enforcement.
The benefits of the program are circular: Not only do the dogs go on to serve those who need help, they also positively impact the inmates who raise them from 8-week-old puppies, providing them with a sense of purpose and redemption. According to PBB, many of the puppy-raisers go on to work professionally as dog trainers and groomers after they’re paroled.
“Craig makes me feel whole,” says Dunasha Payne, fighting back tears as she speaks about her 2-year-old black lab, which is expected to graduate from PPB and start life as a service dog within the next few weeks. “And I love him so much, and it’s like, I tried my best with my dog, and I put all my personal feeling aside to raise him to the fullest potential that I could. But they make you feel like you’re worth something, and they make you [feel] that you have a purpose in life, and that you’re not just a prisoner, that you’re not just here to do some time.”
A NEED FOR SUPPORT
In 1997, the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility became the first prison in New York to implement Puppies Behind Bars. The program, which is funded through outside donations, initially focused on raising and training seeing-eye dogs. But then came 9/11 and the subsequent conflicts in the Middle East.
“Being a New Yorker, living in New York, being there on September 11th, I’ve always thought that those first responders were thanked and thanked and thanked initially, and then they kind of weren’t,” says PPB founder and president Gloria Gilbert Stoga, who once worked on a commission to find employment for low-income New Yorkers under former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. “They kind of blended into the background, [but they] had a lot of health issues.”
It was at that point that Stoga widened PPB’s mission to include the training and deployment of explosive-detection canines and, later, service dogs for traumatized first responders and wounded veterans.
“With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raging, I kept thinking, ‘What can I do? What can I do?’” she says. “The answer was that I can help these [inmates] raise service dogs that we can donate to wounded war veterans.”
Along with a handful of other instructors, including former inmates who have gone on to work for PPB, Stoga teaches prisoners how to raise service dogs. She also conducts several group training sessions a year, in which veterans are paired with dogs and learn from the inmate-trainers how to work with them. The program puts 2-month-old puppies, most of which are labrador retrievers, under the watchful eyes of inmates. These devoted doggy caretakers live, sleep and work with the pooches 24/7 until they’ve mastered an industry-standard 85 commands, like opening doors for wheelchair users, plus five more that specifically help sufferers of PTSD and TBI (traumatic brain injury).
Most dogs are able to complete the training program in 12 to 24 months. To date, PBB has put more than 250 to use as guide, service, therapy and companion dogs, plus another 437 have gone on to work with law enforcement as bomb-sniffing dogs.
Though the Department of Correction does not track recidivism rates of parolees who have participated in PBB, a DOC spokesperson says it measures success in the soft skills gained by inmates who care for the dogs.
“Part of [DOC’s] mission is to prepare individuals for their transition back to the community,” the spokesperson says. “[Puppies Behind Bars] incentivizes good behavior in the facility, as well as giving individuals the opportunity to do something positive for someone else, while learning patience, pride and accomplishment — all of which will benefit them when they reenter society.”
‘WE MANUFACTURE BEST FRIENDS’
The walk through Bedford Hills Correctional Facility — the only maximum-security prison for women in the state — is brimming with reminders of exactly where you are. There may be a few pretty flowers here and there, sure, but it’s all against a backdrop of barbed wire and high fences.
“I’ve been here for years,” says a prison security guard. “And let me tell you, this is like no other program. It really works. They are the most well-behaved inmates.”
It’s 8:30 in the morning, and Payne is on a turfed field playing fetch with her dog, Craig.
Payne has changed her life around since entering prison in 2013. Originally from Queens, she was well-known in local tabloids as “hell on wheels” after mowing down and killing her ex-boyfriend in a jealous rage.
She says that everything is different now. She has been part of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, an in-prison arts program that has been shown to dramatically reduce recidivism rates, and is now a trainer with Puppies Behind Bars, which — according to the organization’s mission statement — aims to help those living in prison learn to sacrifice for a bigger cause. Another perk is that inmates who take part in the program can shave six months off their sentence.
“I’ve had Craig since he was 8 weeks old. I also have a child at home who is 8 years old, and I left her when she was 3,” says Payne. “And not to compare the two, but for me, I really got my confidence in proving to [the PBB staff] that I can indeed take care of a dog. I felt that my purpose was way more important than just me being a regular average inmate.”
Other inmates say the program has fostered in them a passion for helping others. When a first responder was paired with the dog Alice Trappler had raised, she saw it as an opportunity to help a man fighting deep depression.
“He shared with us that he felt broken. He didn’t feel at all like he was worthwhile. And he had tried to commit suicide, which to me is heartbreaking,” says Trappler, who’s serving a 25-year-to-life sentence. “My comment to him was that his dog did not think he was broken. She thought he was great, and she thought he was the best thing ever.
“We manufacture best friends, because they’re infallible and they love you no matter what.”
In These Prisons, Former Offenders Find Healing in Theatre Arts
Omar Williams is an actor — a deadly one, he jokes. Having spent 21 years in prison for kidnapping and attempted murder, the Fishkill Correctional Facility inmate says he’s been acting his whole life to get what he wants.
“I know exactly how to play you,” he tells me from one of the counseling offices at the prison, which is located about 60 miles north of New York City. “I could tell you anything to bullshit you, to rob you, to kill you. I’ve been acting my whole life.”
Minutes later, Williams — known as “Sweets” to his fellow inmates — stands in a classroom and recites lines to the 19th-century French play Cyrano de Bergerac.
In the scene, de Bergerac joins his friend Le Bret — played by Williams — among sleeping soldiers and talks about how he just cheated death, again. The director, Charlie Scatamacchia, stops the scene halfway through to give Williams a basic lesson in being a thespian: You gotta emote.
“You’re just reading the words,” Scatamacchia tells him. “Actually say what they’re saying.”
As the scene starts up again, Williams is animated and expressive; his whole body is in movement. It’s not exactly a Tony Award-winning performance, but Scatamacchia approves. He nods emphatically. Williams is nailing it.
The rehearsal is part of a program run by volunteers with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a New York nonprofit that provides workshops and classes in a myriad of disciplines, from theater and music to creative writing, painting and dance, in men’s and women’s prisons around the state. The goal: to facilitate the social, emotional and cognitive skills needed to succeed on the outside.
Similar art-as-therapy programs are found only in a handful of states, despite the fact that they’ve been proven to be effective in reducing disciplinary infractions and improving anger management. One 2012 study found a nearly three-fold increase in inmates pursuing college-level academics after participating in RTA. Inmates have also shown enhanced speaking skills and self-esteem. But perhaps most impressive: RTA boasts a nearly 5 percent recidivism rate, meaning almost 95 percent of people who go through the program don’t reoffend after their release. That’s a genuinely remarkable percentage, as the national recidivism rate is close to 77 percent after five years.
Unfortunately, arts programs are also usually the first to be cast aside when a prison has a need for more beds or security. And not everyone is a fan, either: Critics, including corrections officers and victims, claim that “cold-blooded” killers and hardened criminals don’t deserve prison-arts programs. But the flip side, argue prison-reform advocates, is that, eventually, most will be released back into their communities, and so it’s to everyone’s benefit that they be rehabilitated in whatever way works before that happens.
“Do we want them to be better criminals when they get out, or to make better choices,” asks Craig Cullinane, director of programming for RTA. “These people who commit crimes, they should have the ability to go back to the world better than when they come in. Isn’t that what we want?”
OUT OF THE DARKNESS
Fishkill’s prison is a visual tease. The all-male medium-security prison boasts a prepossessing Gothic façade set against the bucolic backdrop of the Hudson Valley’s lush greenery. In early spring, a mist envelops the grounds, making it impossible to see that the prison is surrounded by over 20-foot-high chain-link fences wrapped by barbed wire.
Every day at 6 p.m. the men weave their way through the complex, walking down paved streets in between fences and buildings for their allotted nightly recreation time. Twice a week the dozen or so men that participate in RTA meet to go over lines, stagecraft and scene construction.
For those who have bad days — and there’s no denying there are a lot of those in prison — RTA is a welcome escape.
“The first thing we do is we go around and share one word about how we feel that day. I want them to share honestly, but in reality they’re dealing with a lot of crap,” says Scatamacchia, who has been directing plays with RTA for two years as a volunteer.
Williams had one of those bad days about two and half years ago. His twin children were stillborn. Out of rage and sorrow, he threatened to stab another inmate in the neck.
“I could’ve killed someone that day. Thank God for RTA at that moment,” he says. “They really helped me through it.”
The program is not intended to remake prisoners into professional actors. It’s not designed to help them find a career in the arts after release. Rather, says executive director Katherine Vockins, who founded RTA in 1996, it provides inmates the opportunity to tap into emotions and develop the soft skills that can help them deal with tough situations.
That’s not to say it’s easy.
“We are all looking for the ‘fix’ that will take people — often badly damaged by life experience — and put them through some magical program that washes, dries and folds, ending with neatly functioning citizens,” says Vockins, adding that progress is hard to measure in terms of before and after. “Deep, lasting change in cognition and behavior does not work that way.”
California was one of the first states to bring the arts to correctional facilities. In 1977, the Prison Arts Project, a program run by the nonprofit William James Association, was introduced at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. A few years later, its success led to a new administrative office, Arts-in-Corrections, within the California Department of Corrections.
The University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), launched in 1990, started out by teaching painting to less than 50 female inmates. Today the program is available at every prison in the state, and PCAP hosts one of the largest prisoner-art exhibitions in the world.
“For the incarcerated, the fact that somebody on the outside is reaching out to make connections and to see people beyond their prison numbers, in itself, has value,” says Elaine Chen, PCAP’s events and exhibits coordinator. “Even just to connect with people without a reason or a shield of social justice — just to do art together — brings a lot of therapeutic value.”
Research into Michigan’s program has shown that inmates who take part in the arts report an 86 percent higher quality of life while in prison than before they joined PCAP, and 93 percent self-reported learning new and better ways to express themselves, according to Chen.
“We can transform our lives, even in here,” says Ronald “Bach” Jarvis, a Fishkill inmate and RTA participant who has been serving 17 years for manslaughter. “[RTA] helped me find myself. It’s easy to get lost in here in the mist and darkness. But to find that light? That’s what this program is for me.”
A FUNDING FAILURE
Despite numerous studies showing that arts education works inside of prison — as well as outside, in terms of reoffending once released — programs continue to be cut from state budgets across the country, with more expected in the next few months.
California’s Arts-in-Corrections, for example, was almost eliminated in 2003 when the state was in the depths of a financial crisis. The program was saved by private investors, including members of California Lawyers for the Arts, who donated heavily to the program.
Other state-run arts-rehabilitation programs might not be so lucky. In the Trump Administration’s latest budget proposal, funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, which only makes up less than 1 percent of the national budget, would be cut from $150 million to $29 million. The NEA funds, in part, almost every prison-arts program in the country.
Though RTA does not receive direct funding from NEA grants, it does get money from the New York State Council on the Arts, which has received over $3.5 million from the NEA since 2013, according to the endowment’s archives. Money from the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) is also at risk.
“The shakiness of the economy has affected the NYS budget,” Vockins says. “[We have been told] that while the DOCCS budget is huge, the allocation to programs is quite small. Even vocational programs have been severely cut.”
Outside of funding, there is also a problem with capacity. RTA, for example, operates in five prisons throughout New York but relies almost wholly on volunteers.
“Until a year ago, we [had been] four people for 20 years,” says Cullinane, the director of programming. “It comes down to leadership and what [our state leaders] care about. We get very little from the state; we raise almost all our money ourselves.”
THE MEN BEHIND THE BARS
“Cyrano is an interesting choice of a play,” Scatamacchia says. He’s sipping coffee at the NoMad Library Bar in Manhattan, telling me about his background in theater and how he came to volunteer with RTA.
The task of teaching the art of acting to prisoners wasn’t something that he expected to be so fulfilling, he says, adding that, initially, he was afraid of what he would encounter. Instead, he was pleasantly surprised at how easygoing and intelligent the men were.
“It’s totally different from television,” he says of his experience.
The participants in the program get to decide which play to put on — for his first RTA gig, Scatamacchia directed them in The Odd Couple — and the choice of Cyrano de Bergerac set him aback. “It’s not like we teach theory or anything like that, but there is an interesting lesson to be taken from this play. You can’t look at [the character of] Cyrano and know everything about him,” he says.
The feeling of constantly being judged is something that many of the men at Fishkill experience. They say that those on “the outside” just don’t care to know about the lives of people on the inside. It’s easy to feel forgotten.
But RTA has helped them feel remembered and recognized, even in a small way.
“This makes me feel special,” says Jarvis. “Attention is positive. If I can strike people positively in this form, it makes me feel human again.”
October 8, 2018 3:20 p.m.: This story’s headline has been changed.
How to Build a Better Jail
Rikers Island, the infamous and isolated jail complex located off the coastline of New York City, is officially being shut down. And in its place is the possibility of new community jails that are designed, specifically, for better treatment of inmates.
Improving the city’s jails, and especially Rikers — which critics have long charged is inhumane, unsafe and dysfunctional — has been a top-line agenda for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Since taking office, his administration has focused on curbing the jail population; reducing the use of solitary confinement; and easing the transition back to society for the formerly incarcerated.
In conjunction with closing Riker’s 10 jails, an independent commission last year recommended the city open smaller facilities — called “justice hubs” — that would be located next to local courts and integrated into existing neighborhoods. The vision for this modern system of jails includes built-in amenities that would be shared with local residents (think exercise facilities, community gardens and art studios).
“Our understanding about design and incarceration has evolved significantly since the jails on Rikers Island were built,” says Elizabeth Glazer, director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. “Light, sound and the arrangement of space are important in creating a safer, calmer environment for the people residing and working there.”
There’s evidence prisoners’ surroundings can affect their outcomes. In upstate New York, for example, camplike facilities that are embedded among pristine lakes and trees, and where inmates sleep in barracks, not cells, have seen markedly low recidivism rates.
The idea of using design and architecture to influence behavior is not a new one for New York City. In August of last year, officials partnered with the Center for Court Innovation and the social-impact design firm Zago to overhaul the interior spaces of Manhattan Criminal Court. Changes included installing new, visitor-friendly signage and erecting a defendants’ bill of rights.
“Manhattan Criminal Court is a pretty foreboding and intimidating place, especially for those who are there for the first time,” says Emily LaGratta, director of procedural justice initiatives at the Center for Court Innovation. She notes that many courts across the country evoke similar negative feelings. “Courthouses were built years ago, when the justice system was addressing a different scope of problems. That, plus new innovation, has imposed additional needs on these spaces. So a lobby that was built to be grand and open is now accommodating security lines and magnetometers.”
Just as the needs of courthouses have changed, so too have the needs of New York’s jails. The city has announced a plan to reduce incarceration numbers to 5,000 in 10 years, and officials are exploring the possibility of eliminating the cash-bail system.
But incorporating the proposed justice hubs — and the prisoners within them — into residential neighborhoods might be a hard sell for the city.
Still, officials are pushing for jails that could address community needs, similar to a public library’s social outreach programs, that would help reduce the stigma of incarceration while building stronger, healthier communities.
Initially, the effort seemed purely physical — move inmates to jails that are closer to their lawyers, courthouses and neighborhood resources. But it also got city officials thinking: Can correctional facilities be designed in a way that’s safer for inmates and guards, while also engaging the communities in which they’d be built?
“Over the past few decades we have learned, and commonsense informs, that when those who are incarcerated have regular contact with their families and lawyers, it improves both the atmosphere inside, the relationships with officers and staff, and the transition back to neighborhoods,” Glazer says. “This is especially important in jails where most people stay for a short period of time.”
The city issued requests for proposals last year on designs for the new jails and in January chose the firm Perkins Eastman, which was awarded $7.5 million and given 10 months to finalize a blueprint.
“Buildings are not static things … they work with or against the people that are intended to be within them, and there is no better example than a prison,” says Michael Murphy, co-founder and executive director of MASS Designs in Boston. “Even in the most well intentioned prisons, they are intended to separate or to torture people who are incarcerated and restrict access to freedoms.
“There’s almost an intentional lack of design,” he adds.
In reimagining what tomorrow’s prisons will look like, firms like Murphy’s are turning to the past, when other historical institutions left their aesthetic imprint.
“A great example are public libraries,” says Murphy. “You have the Carnegie libraries largely built with foundation dollars from the Carnegie family, which are these beautiful, opulent temples to books.”
Compare that to the “Lindsay boxes” of the 1970s, when New York Mayor John Lindsay had pushed for a library branch in every neighborhood. The results were quickly constructed, one-story buildings made of cinder block.
“It’s a stark difference in imagination,” Murphy continues. “We’ve lowered our expectations of what we deserve. That’s what prisons identify.”
And what we know about design with the greater good in mind is that it works, says Brad Samuels of SITU, an architectural research and design firm in New York.
“These [kinds of designs] are already happening; they’re not speculative,” Samuels says, adding that his firm has worked with low-wage immigrant communities to build housing in Queens, where families are often stuffed into cramped quarters. “We found the best way to build is through community groups and organizations who understand what their needs are.”
Our Bail System Isn’t Working
For the past few years, states have been slowly making progress on reforming their criminal justice laws, including throwing out past marijuana infractions, ending solitary confinement for juveniles and recommending significantly less jail time for nonviolent crimes.
Now, bail reform is getting its time in the spotlight — or in the hot seat, depending — as New Jersey marks its one-year anniversary of ending the practice that requires defendants to pay their way out of jail before a trial. (Currently, the state releases low-level offenders to their homes, while others are held for 48 hours; during that time, prosecutors put together a criminal profile that determines if a person will be kept in prison.)
Many lawmakers are taking up similar reform strategies, as overhauling the nation’s bail system also makes for smart across-the-aisle politics in a time of heightened partisanship. Senators Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., last year introduced a bill that would incentivize states to end or reform their money-bail programs.
Bail was originally intended to motivate defendants to show up for all of their hearings; if they do so, their money is given back to them once their trial is over. But studies have found that posting bail — which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the crime — is no guarantee that someone will return to the courtroom. In the meantime, defendants arrested for a low-level offense and can’t afford bail often sit in jail for days or weeks, costing them time away from family and their jobs, and costing taxpayers an average of $38 million every day.
Data from a 2016 study conducted in Pennsylvania by Columbia University researchers found that there was no correlation between being released on bail and returning to court. What the researchers did find, however, is that those who couldn’t afford their bail and thus remained in jail were more likely to commit future crimes by almost 10 percent. The study also found “significant evidence of a correlation between pretrial detention and both conviction and recidivism.” In other words, our current money-bail system is one in which a minor offense often leads to more offenses, entrapping low-income people in a cycle of incarceration simply because they’re unable to pay.
What’s more, the Bronx Freedom Fund in New York City, which bails out people without requiring reimbursement, has found that nearly all of the defendants they sponsor do return to court, despite not having a financial incentive for doing so.
“We know that bail does not make people return to court in greater percentages,” says Jonathan Lippman, the former chief judge for the New York Court of Appeals and current chair of the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform. In fact, he says, “The people who return to court are absolutely at the percentages of those [who weren’t required to post] bail at all.”
Lippman, among others, has been a supporter of using algorithms, or risk-assessment models, to decide whether bail should be mandated for a defendant.
Judges in more than half of the nation rely on these models in some way. Inputting data, such as whether a defendant has a criminal record and the zip code where they live, is used to determine how likely it is that the person will later show up in court.
But risk-assessment tools aren’t a perfect panacea, say critics, and their widespread use can still lead to racial or economic biases.
A recent class-action lawsuit filed in Harris County, Texas, concluded that those with money are given preferential treatment when calculating data; for example, the risk-assessment tool used to determine whether or not someone would return for trial gave the same weight to being poor as it did to having a prior offense.
“Under the County’s risk-assessment point system … poverty indicators (such as not owning a car) receive the same point value as prior criminal violations or prior failures to appear in court,” a federal appeals court decided. “Thus, an arrestee’s impoverishment increased the likelihood he or she would need to pay to be released.”
Richard Berk, who created the algorithm currently used in Pennsylvania’s risk-assessment tool, says that it’s a fool’s errand to think that algorithms would create a perfect environment.
“The question is not whether the algorithms are accurate and fair, but whether they are more accurate and more fair than current practice,” Berk said in an email. “So we can reduce errors and reduce bias, which does not mean that the accuracy is perfect and that all possible bias is gone. As they say, we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
But as more states take on reforming their bail practices, a uniquely American institution is at risk: the commercial bail-bond industry.
Bail-bond offices put up money for a defendant while typically keeping 10 percent. If defendants don’t show up to court, the bond office gets fined, and a bounty hunter is dispatched to find the missing person.
Though the bail-bond services industry grew by almost 3 percent between 2011 and 2016 and brought in $2 billion in revenue, it’s now facing increasing pressure as some jurisdictions have done away with the need for bail bondsmen altogether by eliminating cash bail.
In New Jersey, for example, bail-bond shops have seen a dramatic reduction in business and are operating under threat of closing. Last summer, reality TV star Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman stood outside a New Jersey courthouse and claimed that the elimination of bail bonds were “killing people.”
But for bail-reform advocates, Chapman’s argument is stale. And like it or not, that reform is coming, as New York, Delaware and California are all looking to eliminate — or at least reconsider — their money-bail practices.
“You have a lot of research to show that bail is harmful. Those points need to be disseminated,” says Zoë Towns, the director of criminal justice programs at the bipartisan advocacy group FWD.us, in response to how reform might affect bail-bond business owners. “Our position on bail reform and justice is looking at how we can drive down incarceration rates, and that may mean that structures within and outside the system need to be changed.”
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An earlier version of this story identified FWD.us as a left-leaning organization, not a bipartisan one. We regret the error.
This Nonprofit Has Hit on the Way to Keep Ex-Offenders Out of Prison
On a gray morning earlier this year, former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey was talking with Omari Atiba, a convicted felon, in Newark when they were interrupted by Atiba’s phone. As the recently released prisoner’s cell blasted the ’70s disco staple “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” McGreevey couldn’t help but nod along, full white-man-overbite style.
Few could blame the former politician for feeling upbeat. For the past three years, McGreevey — no stranger himself to controversy, having resigned his governorship in 2004 — has been working to remove the obstacles that face ex-inmates once they’re released. On the morning they met, Atiba was just two days out of a New Jersey state prison, where he served 30 years for murder.
Transforming ex-convicts like Atiba into responsible, engaged civilians is a project that has earned McGreevey the support of Chris Christie and four other former Garden State governors. It also led him to John Koufos, a former criminal defense lawyer whose own fall from grace after a drunken hit-and-run accident in 2012 resulted in disbarment and 16 months in prison. Today, Koufos is second-in-command at New Jersey Reentry Corporation (NJRC), the nonprofit founded by McGreevey in 2014.
NJRC has five outposts in the state, including Jersey City, Kearney, Newark, Paterson and Toms River. Its mission is to overhaul onetime prisoners’ lives by overseeing their sobriety, and training and placing them in meaningful jobs. The ambitious project carries an annual price tag of $3 million, which is funded largely by the state.
With a roster of around 1,600 clients, NJRC’s success rate has been praised by the Manhattan Institute as among the best of the New York City–area reentry prison programs. According to a recent analysis by the think tank, U.S. prisons release approximately 650,000 inmates every year. Within the first 12 months, more than half are unable to secure identification and jobs that earn them enough legal income to survive.
But certain programs, like NJRC’s, are proving successful in preventing such scenarios. From January to July 2016, NJRC placed around 1,000 former prisoners in jobs spanning sales, transportation, food services, manufacturing and public works, many with on-ramps to more lucrative positions with building-trade unions.
That 62 percent job-placement rate likely helped NJRC achieve its low 19.7 percent recidivism. Though that figure is impressive, it spans just six months; the true measure of success will be where these former inmates are five years from now. As the most recent national survey by the Department of Justice found, an estimated three-quarters of ex-offenders are arrested for a new crime within five years of release.
Understanding McGreevey’s and Koufos’ backgrounds helps explain their strategy. McGreevey, as former governor, knows New Jersey influencers, like the chair of the state DMV, and has persuaded them to do things like untangle knotty driver’s records to clear a path toward regaining the right to drive, often essential to maintaining a job. And Koufos, who handled hundreds of pro bono cases for the NAACP before he went to prison, has recruited close to 70 young lawyers to clear up unresolved past infractions such as traffic tickets that can, and often do, return former inmates to their cells.
“It’s incredibly sad,” McGreevey said. “So many of our clients have a sense that catastrophe is right around the corner.”
Sadder still is that often they’re right. Koufos says missteps like missed child support payments can easily secure ex-offenders a return ticket to prison. “A lot of times folks don’t participate in family court” because they’re scared of the outcome, which may include fines. “When they have a lawyer holding their hand, they’re no longer afraid.”
Though they are both the heroes of their own second acts, Koufos and McGreevey are an odd couple. McGreevey studied to be a priest after resigning his Trenton post. Koufos’ wobbly relationship with religion surfaces only at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “More jobs, less Jesus,” Koufos often reminds McGreevey when they’re talking to clients. But ultimately McGreevey is less concerned with helping clients find God than with helping them find footing in a social landscape built to topple them.
He meets weekly with prisoners across New Jersey to explain NJRC’s mission as well as his own rocky road to redemption. He was the closeted gay governor who left in disgrace, he reminds prisoners. What if it had taken him until his deathbed to come to the realizations that have helped him move forward?
Both men see every day as a chance to stub out others’ doomsday narratives. Atiba, the convicted murderer, now weighs fish in the seafood department at Newark’s ShopRite.
And Patrick D’Aiuto, who once lived in the cell across from Koufos and was released from prison in 2013 after 18 years for armed robbery, is now a commercial roofer with a union. He makes in the high $20s per hour and recently bought a condo.
“I spent pretty much my whole adult life in prison, and I knew that a lot of these programs can be tongue-in-cheek. I always wondered, Why doesn’t the media go to these people who claim to run these great programs and say, ‘If you actually helped someone get a good job, produce that person.’ They’d never be able to produce anybody.”
NJRC, D’Aiuto says, is different: “They’re not just getting guys jobs at Burger King. They’re getting them jobs with benefits that will get them a middle-class existence, so they can lead a productive life.”
Not that they succeed every time. A healthy percentage of clients, most of whom are addicts being treated through NJRC’s recovery channels, relapse. If a client is using, he gets a warning. If there is a second infraction, he’s out. Koufos is generally the one who does the kicking out.
He doesn’t mind, though.
“I dedicated myself to a life of service because of the pain I caused when I was addicted,” Koufos says. “If we can help the next guy recover, we stop the next victim from happening.”
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A Food Truck Run by Former Inmates Charts a New Course
Since 2014 the New York City–based Drive Change has been operating a food truck, called Snowday, as a way of reducing recidivism rates among young people. The organization hires and mentors formerly jailed young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. And so far, it has ushered more than 20 of them through its paid fellowship program, which provides both specific training in the culinary arts as well as broader professional-development skills. Graduates of the program have gone on to work as line cooks in upscale restaurants and catering companies.
Now Drive Change is ready to scale its operations for greater impact as other cities, including Baltimore and Pittsburgh, have expressed interest in launching similar programs. With a commissary set to open in 2018, Drive Change hopes to increase the number of fellows from roughly eight a year to 40.
Also on the menu for the nonprofit: a re-branding and a new look. Beginning in July, the award-winning Snowday will be called Drive Change, though it will still feature a seasonal menu with locally sourced food. In addition, the company is adopting an affiliate model where other food trucks that hire young adults coming home from prison can get Drive Change–Certified.
Founded by 31-year-old Jordyn Lexton, Snowday was originally conceived as the first in a fleet of food trucks. But the re-branding was necessary, Lexton says, because marketing different trucks while still promoting the organization’s social-impact mission proved too resource-intensive.
“We were constantly trying to figure out how to put our resources behind one brand versus the other,” says Lexton. “We recognized it caused more confusion than we had originally envisioned.” There was also a concern that Drive Change could be perceived as exploiting the very group of people it aims to help, adds Lexton. “We’ve been able to have young people we work with take ownership of our mission and what we stand for, and that’ll be forefront in our [new] brand identity.”
As Drive Change transitions, it is only accepting event bookings from organizations working directly in the field of social or racial justice, including re-entry from the criminal justice system. Says Lexton, “We’re really trying to raise awareness around those issues so change can happen.”
Homepage photo via Drive Change.
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