I shall begin with a disclaimer. I have never personally been in a position to experience the travails of a prisoner after release. All the information and the opinion that follows has been gleaned from observation and conversation with those who have gone out into society and had to deal with the issues of leaving prison.
Since prison is where this process begins let me give you a bit of insight into the way prison teaches prisoners to think. Prison is operated on a socialistic principle. The minimum required is provided to you and you receive the same as everyone else regardless of your station. However, once the minimums have been established, cooperation and behavior are manipulated through the maintenance or removal of them. Materialistically nothing is earned. Everything is provided for you in those minimum quantities, from clothing to recreation time and meal servings. A person need not fulfill any requirement in order to get his issue nor is he allowed through merit to enhance it. The system places the prisoner in a mind frame of dependence. The system acts as a training ritual that constantly re-instills this dependence. By the time a person has served his sentence and is ready to be released this thought process is well established and has become the mode by which a person conducts himself.
This is the thinking of a prisoner as he switches from prison to society. Society, however, operates from a completely different frame of reference. Society is republican and capitalistic. Everyone is not equal; merit brings reward; excessive reliance and sponging actually bring penalties. You have to regulate yourself because there is no more chow call at 0600 every morning to wake you up. Society is not a conducive environment for success to someone emerging from a socialistic incarceration.
The programming in prison derives from the same disassociated logic. The rehabilitation programs are meant to try and create structure in people incapable of creating it within themselves. But the programs are based on a self-study system. A person incapable of creating an internal structure within themselves is not going to thrive at anything requiring self-study. Yet within the structured environment of prison the self-study programs give the appearance of some success because prisoners are capable of completing them within such structure and receiving their certificates under such confining conditions.
The moment the structure is removed by release the person no longer has the tools necessary to keep himself focused and a program of continued self-study becomes an immediate failure. The advantages of the prison setting with its structure and constant supervision evaporate when a prisoner is removed to society. Consequently the programs are generally abandoned and a person returns to the familiar which is usually the conduct that put him in prison in the first place. The problem is that there are few places a newly released prisoner can go and still have these aspects of structure and intervention maintained while having a meaningful transition into the different thinking processes of society.
Considering this mind frame, how to accomplish the reform of prisoners is an important question to address. Embodied in the Alaska constitution is the premise that reformation is one of the principles of our criminal justice system. Unfortunately this has so far been narrowly interpreted to encompass only the rehabilitation provided during incarceration, See Goodlataw v. Dept. of Health and Social Services, 698 P.2d 1190. The courts have not yet established the extent of the Department of Corrections’ (DOC) responsibility for people who are no longer incarcerated yet are still under the supervision of the DOC. This has created a disconnect between the system and the people in is supposed to be reforming.
When a person comes to prison and a need is discovered for the reformation and programs offered there, it is a simple matter to get that person involved. In prison, classification, placement and, often, early release are tied to participation in and completion of an assortment of these programs. Also a person’s general comfort level in prison is tied to good behavior. Good behavior generally requires people to abstain from the vices of drugs, alcohol and anger. When these things are readily available to a person it is the message of and participation in these programs that provides the encouragement and resources for someone to abstain. Within the confined environment of prison the programs themselves, and the mostly compulsory participation in them, complement each other in assisting people to abstain and in developing more acceptable behavior habits.
Prison, however, is the easy part of this equation. Although drugs and alcohol are available in prison they are expensive or time consuming to prepare, and are by no means plentiful. The economics of prison, therefore, play a role in the abstaining and good behavior of prisoners. But when a prisoner is released the balance of this equation goes terribly awry. Drugs and alcohol are readily available in society, especially within the social circles most prisoners inhabit upon release from incarceration. The temptation of one’s addictions becomes a constant presence and there is neither the structured life of prison nor the availability of intensive intervention to fall back on. The advantages that made the self–study programs available within the confines of prison are no longer there. The reality becomes stark that what provided the most assistance to a prisoner’s continued recovery was not the self-study program but the structure of prison and the availability of the intervention of others.
Society must come to the realization that what is required to reform the addictive personalities involved is structure and intervention. The fact that these are readily available within the prison environment is what leads to the delusion that prison programs are successful at rehabilitating people. This is not so. Prison programs are successful at creating a foundation for people to build a life upon once released. The problem is that once released the tools to go and build a successful life upon this foundation are generally missing. Having a solid foundation is pointless if all one can build upon it is a house of straw. Without post-release programs that build upon that foundation and provide for the continued upkeep of the structure, then the building of the foundation in the first place is useless and a waste of time and money. Society must put forth the effort to provide continued intervention and structure if it is to make any kind of success out of the process it begins with the availability of programming in prison.
A transitional, post-release environment is what is missing. Halfway houses should be fulfilling this need. However, for the most part, halfway houses in Alaska are used as alternative incarceration, housing drug and alcohol offenders with short sentences or who came in for the purpose of completing some short-term intervention programming. The mind frame of these people coming from the streets for a short time is completely different than the mind frame of someone coming from prison after serving a long sentence. In such a co-mingled environment there is no support for the person coming from prison to continue to maintain the structure necessary to live in a functional way. All of the halfway houses in Alaska are intermingled in this way. People are coming in from the streets drunk or high and the person coming from prison has to live in this situation with little or no support for maintaining their own program.
The cause of a big part of this problem is that all of the halfway houses in Alaska are private contractors. They have the final approval on who they accept. The DOC cannot just classify a prisoner to a halfway house. The DOC has to furlough a prisoner to the halfway house and then the halfway house has to accept them. The halfway house, being a private shop makes its decisions based on a variety of concerns: insurance policies, quotas necessary to maintain grants they receive, community and rental concerns over the buildings they occupy, and an assortment of other concerns that don’t necessarily have to do with the reformation of prisoners. A prisoner who has served a lengthy sentence has to wait a considerable amount of time for a bed to be made available to him, and that is on top of the time it has taken him to be classified as eligible for furlough or to have served enough time to be going up for parole. A large part of this wait is because the beds that are available are apportioned to short-term placement people and long-term people have to be fit in where they can. There are no designated facilities for people coming out of prison to go to and to be a part of a transitional support system made up of other people going through the same transition.
This is the major problem. Until the DOC creates facilities or programs specifically for this transition, prison programming is going to continue to prove useless in assisting people to function successfully in society. The programs to facilitate this should not be post-release programs either. They should begin as a prison housing set-up such as the programs at Wildwood in Kenai and at Florence in Arizona. They should be graduated release programs which are geared towards transitioning into society and not towards fulfilling court orders. The programs should be at least two years long and one’s progress through them should allow for incremental reductions in custody until a final phase of six months or so sees a person out of prison in a halfway house. The halfway house should be geared towards the same goals and should house only people coming from prison. It would be in the best interests of the state for the legislature to provide incentives to contractors who are willing to run their houses with an emphasis on such people and programs.
The goal of these programs should be to provide the skills necessary to function successfully in society. Computer literacy; knowledge of basic economics like balancing a checkbook and living within a budget; basic communication skills being interviewed and holding coherent conversations; basic writing skills like preparing resumes and applications; these are the kinds of subjects that should be focused on in transitional programming. Aspects of peoples’ addictions should have been addressed before this transition phase even began. That foundation should already have been constructed and the transition programming should be the first step in building a sound structure on that foundation. All of this should take place prior to release. A program like this should begin about two years prior to release. For people being paroled the parole board should be giving people who have served more than five or six years parole dates contingent on their working through these transitional programs. It is imperative people possess the basic skills necessary to function in society and DOC should not be releasing people without the provision of these shills. As long as DOC continues to do so people will go out into society from prison and be dysfunctional and the expenditures made on prison programming will continue to have been wasted.
CCA/FCC 2005