Today it
seems that everyone is looking for a solution to the problem of how to safely
reintegrate offenders back into the community from our penal institutions. It is a hot priority issue with top
government officials, law enforcement, and political figures alike. In fact, the problem is such that it is being
treated as a serious public safety issue that the entire community should be
involved in helping to solve, according to the Philadelphia Consensus Group on
Reentry.
The
principal reason the LIFERS, Inc.’s Public Safety Initiatives, (PSI) should be
included in the Criminal Justice Reform and Restorative Justice Platform of
Democratic Presidential Candidate and former United States Vice President The
Honorable Joseph R. Biden is because, through Project Pipeline To Prison
Youth/Reclaiming Their Lives As Men, we are prepared to actively demonstrate
best practices for reentry from an inside-out self-help perspective , supported
by an External Working Group of Criminal Justice and Restorative Justice
advocates.
Some years
ago, I read an interesting quote on the cover of a concept paper representing a
group of ex-offenders working for prison reform out of New York which
says: “The great illusion of
leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has
never been there.”
I believe
this quote will be helpful in giving you a better understanding of the message
we bring to you today from the inmates, volunteers, and ex-offenders who are
involved with the reentry initiatives of People Advancing Reintegration (PAR)
and Project Pipeline To Prison Youth/Reclaiming Their Lives As Men.
What this quote
means, in our unique situation, is that it takes a prisoner or an ex-offender
who has been intimately involved with crime, substance abuse, prison, and the
societal conditions influencing those negative experiences, to navigate a safe
passage back into the community. Viewing
the problem from this angle, and seeing a need to break away from a vicious
circumstance of dependence, ninety-five percent of our problem was solved when
we, as offenders, adopted the attitude of seeing ourselves being the problem of
crime and recidivism correcting itself.
It was the only responsible position for us to take in the situation if
our lives were to improve for the better.
And, we have indeed worked out a solution to the problem of how to
safely reintegrate offenders back into the community out of Graterford
Prison/SCI Phoenix. But it is going to
require, in addition to continued support of the prison administration, support
of the parole authority, and the External Working Group of Project Pipeline To
Prison Youth/Reclaiming Their Lives As Men to make the plan we offer today
successful.
People
Advancing Reintegration, Inc. (PAR) is an innovative inmate self-help program I
created at Graterford Prison in 1987 to help fellow prisoners prepare for their
freedom in a realistic and responsible manner.
With all the government money being expended for programs to help
offenders in their return to the community, for us, there was only an alarming
rate of recidivism to show for it. Faced
with that reality, we decided that we, the prisoners ourselves, would have to
take the lead in guiding the mission of reentry if we were to achieve better
results for ourselves.
The
internal phase of the program consists of PAR’s Day One Parole Preparation
Course. The program is conducted once a
week over a period of four months. To
qualify for participation, an inmate must have one year left to his minimum
parole date or pre-release status. The program takes 30 men per cycle.
CLASS FACILITATION METHOD
The first phase
of the program involves a course in Effective Personal Leadership
Training. The second phase involves
problem solving and decision making around parole issues. The program is taught from a PAR workbook
manual, developed by prisoners for prisoners. Each participant is required to prepare a
personalized Written Plan Of Action to guide him upon release. Members of the LIFERS, Inc. Public Safety
Initiative conduct sessions involving its Street Peace Campaign, which offers
our participants a means of doing valuable volunteer public service in support
of that project upon release.
THE ECONOMIC PLIGHT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN
A wise
African American religious leader, the late
W.D. Muhammad, said something that is profoundly true involving the
African American community that equally applies to offenders returning to the
society: “Business is a need in human
nature. Social establishment aspirations
need to mate with business interests. If
it doesn’t, then you don’t have much of a future for yourself in the social
establishment.”
He
continues this thought with the following:
“People need a perception of themselves and the perception of the
reality of themselves in any given situation.
There is a need to keep an eye on what you want from yourself and an eye
on what you want from America. Many of
us do not give serious thought to what we want from ourselves and that is a big
mistake. What are we doing about our own
condition? Are we questioning it? We should support an independent effort. If we invest nothing, then we get
nothing. If we put nothing in, we get
nothing out.”
To begin
with, in most cases involving reentry, prisoners and ex-offenders are treated
like helpless children who need to have a solution to their problem imposed
upon them by those who presume to know what is best for them. Their opinion is not sought at all. They are only included in the process as a
type of welfare recipient.
Even
the government has done away with that debilitating relationship with its poor
and needy citizens. They were forced
from the welfare rolls into a life of independence through its “Welfare To Work” program. Why accept anything less of the
ex-offender? There is a need to place a
portion of those vast sums of reentry dollars at the disposal of Project
Pipeline To Prison Youths/Reclaiming Their Lives As Men. Let us show that we have a realistic plan to
meet the special needs of these young men.
The resource invested will have been well placed. The society would be better off as a result
of it.
COLLECTIVE ECONOMICS
No longer should we be willing to
tolerate going back to fail in our own African American communities where
others find such great business success as outsiders. Our attitude now is that although we came to
prison for committing criminal acts, we are returning as responsible
businessmen determined to compete for a share of the business life and wealth
of our own communities. That way we will
have all the necessary resources to do it together for ourselves in a
collective manner. The time is now.
After many years of operating
under the harsh and punitive “Lock ‘em up and throw away the key” philosophy,
Pennsylvania’s state budget can no longer afford the huge financial burden of
its penal institutions. Fortunately, a
favorable turning point is on the horizon for Pennsylvania’s prison
population. Officials are now
aggressively pursuing release policies to reduce the state’s prison population
as a result of it. I believe these
officials would be open to any creative ideas that would support the reduction
of its prison population with viable alternatives.
From PAR’s perspective there could
be no better opportunity for prisoners, ex-offenders, and volunteers. We can capitalize upon the situation by
showing what it takes to make significant progress with our reentry
program. It would serve as a model to
effectively reduce its prison population in a crisis situation.
From its inception, the driving
force behind PAR’s self-help concept was the stark realization that, at the
core of those problems which contributed to the high rate of recidivism amongst
the participants who came to PAR for help were a host of serious unaddressed
needs they were being confronted with and had no help for what was causing them
to fail. Chief among them was:
1.
No effective
Personal Leadership Training.
2. No
Plan Of Action.
3. Failure
to develop a personal support system.
4. Substance
abuse, idleness, unemployment, peer pressure, and criminal activity
5. A
need for effective decision making skills about imprisonment, and release
issues.
6.
A lack of money for an initial Survival Budget Fund to
meet one’s immediate needs upon release.
There
was another serious draw back to our self-help approach that had to be overcome
if we were to be successful. African
American men carry the stigma of being a group of people who shunned the idea
of taking the initiative to do for self.
That they don’t struggle and make sacrifices in a collective unified
manner in order to overcome difficult circumstances to get ahead like other
men. That meant we would have to take
responsibility for developing the internal and external phases of the program
based on our needs so as to safeguard against failure, from a self-help
perspective. Our plight cried out for
it! It is my firm belief that, as
inmates, we should put the essential components of our reentry model in place
first to show that it can be done independently.
It is important to know that for the
first ten years we worked on perfecting our Day One Parole Preparation Course
as the internal training phase of the program with support of the prison
administration and outside volunteers.
In 1996, we began to place heavy emphasis upon establishing a business-driven
Reentry Zone within the City of Philadelphia for Returning Citizens because of
the pressing need for housing, jobs, and other important services that were not
available to our participants upon release from those who claimed to provide
these services.
With a vested interest in creating a
business-driven Reentry Zone of our own, established and run by ex-offenders, this
approach by prisoners has been the missing link. This is the direction we are moving toward.
Our great advantage is in the fact that
we now have the support of the External Working Group of Project Pipe Line To Prison
Youth/Reclaiming Their Lives As Men behind us to make it happen. Our members are enthusiastic about this
approach. Why? Because they see
themselves as part of an organization being established by themselves. An organization that offers security and a
real sense of purpose in support of their lives in the familiar surroundings of
their own community where they once failed.
Our goal is to establish a networking
arrangement with other organizations and service providers to help support our
membership. Currently, we have been
successful in developing important partnerships with Laura Ford of the Catholic
Archdiocese Prison Ministry Project and others in support of our mission. Four years ago, PAR Recycle Works was created
to provide transitional employment for our participants upon release, thus
laying the foundation for the business-driven Reentry Zone we envision.
We are requesting support of the prison
administration for a systematic way of processing our participants out at their
minimum date who successfully complete PAR’s Day One Parole Preparation
Course. This systematic approach also requires
support of the parole authority, volunteers, and a select group of credible
service providers. By credible service
providers is meant those with an ability to deliver actual services to our
participants upon release in a timely fashion.
The primary reason is to improve upon
the success rate of inmates who fail to complete reentry programs successfully,
and to show how people fare under our support network, versus those who do not
have the benefit of preparation and support.
The intent of this project is to show
how important these unaddressed needs are to the process of reentry and how to
solve them. We bring the issue of the
unaddressed needs to the attention of service providers so that they may be
included in all future considerations involving the treatment and release of
offenders in the 21st century.
Most importantly, this reentry project
we are pursuing would allow PAR’s Reentry Project to bridge the disconnect
between services provider and recipient by wrapping needed services around its
participants to make reentry work for the individual. This would permit service providers to reach
the desired results for which their services were meant to achieve, while at
the same time improving outcomes for the recipient. Service providers are required to participate
in our reentry sessions as guest speakers to familiarize the men with the
service they will provide, and as a means of getting to know the men they will
be working with. Each man is helped
according to his written Plan Of Action, a copy of which is made available to
each partner involved with the Pilot Project.
ROLE OF THE PRISON ADMINISTRATION
The prison administration’s support of
the PAR program over the years has been a key factor in our success. Its support has given us leeway to produce
meaningful results for the prison population that has helped in our ability to
make steady progress towards the Pilot Project we are asking support for
today. The prison administration’s
support is instructive of the kind of trust and cooperation our ideas need to
be given by supporters on the outside in order for them to experience the good
results we produce for reentry on the outside with their support.
It is our participants’ transformed
attitudes that makes the services they receive work. From PAR’s perspective, those services are
treated as a necessary and meaningful hand-up in pursuit of a goal the man
has. He has a personal stake in reaching
it for himself in concert with others for the bigger ideal.
Bill DiMascio, the former Executive
Director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, wrote in a Graterfriends
Newsletter some years ago after meeting with PAR Peer Facilitators:
“Reentry is a buzzword nowadays. And with the lure of millions of government
dollars being spread around the country for this kind of program assistance,
re-entry ‘experts’ are popping up in community meetings, storefronts, and
churches across America.
But there is a secret to re-entry that
lies hidden in the most unlikely place; it takes some digging to unearth. Several months ago we connected with members
of the People Against Recidivism Group at SCI Graterford. Here is its mission: ‘To ensure that our members leaving prison
become productive citizens, in control of thoughts and actions, men devoted to
preserving community safety with faith in their own ability to change their
lives for the better, men free from resentment and armed with the ability to
distinguish clearly between real and unreal.’
That brings us back to the ‘secret’
key to re-entry. It lies inside the people
who know it best – those who have lived and breathed and created the culture of
crime. A growing number of long-term
prisoners speak with passion about the value system that drives street
crime. Some are PAR members; others
belong to different groups. But all
speak to the central issues with a power, a purity, and a passion that grows in
the soul. They possess a credibility
that is central to any effort to guide people to change their way of life.
People who profess to want to do
something to end crime to reduce recidivism, to enhance re-entry should be
listening to them.”
CONCLUSION
All elements needed are in place to take
advantage of this opportunity we have to establish an effective model for
reentry out of SCI Phoenix. We believe
that by networking hand in hand in a special arrangement with a select group of
sincere lay and professional service providers, this would give all parties
concerned a practical example of what we prisoners would do to address reentry
effectively for ourselves, from an inside-out self-help perspective. Ultimately the role of service providers is
to render the support we need to stand on our own. It is our mission to create a multi-faceted
Transformational Center in partnership with the LIFERS, Inc. Public Safety
Initiative within the business-driven Reentry Zone we envision. The Transformational Center will act as a
haven where ex-offenders can meet and be creative in their own right, with an
ability to go where others can’t go in the trenches, relating to the people who
are involved in the culture of crime.
We bring all of this experience with us
in support of Project Pipeline To Prison Youth/Reclaiming Our Lives As Men.
________
Mr. James Muhammed Taylor is the Founder and Director of People Advancing Reintegration, Inc. - SCI Graterford; Chair, Commutation Committee - LIFERS, Inc. (https://www./lifersincpa.org); a Reentry and Criminal Justice Reform Thought Leader; and Contributing Editor to IN SEARCH OF FATHERHOOD(R).
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