How to Straighten out Ex-Cons Part Two
The Faith Factor
I had heard stories from ex-offenders about prison church services, with their brisk trade in cigarettes and joints during the sermon, their opportunities to rack up some good-time credit for piety, or at least get a break from the cell. I was therefore unprepared for what I saw at a Rikers Island chapel one rain-streaked morning last February: 80 men hanging riveted on the preacher?s words; no sleeping, no yawns. If electrifying words and their emotion-charged reception were enough to change behavior, that Rikers service would have churned out 80 newly law-abiding citizens.
The chapel in C-95?the largest corrections facility on Rikers Island, holding around 2,500 men?lies just inside the powder-blue double gates that shut off the outside world. Light shines through a few Lifesaver-colored Lucite panes into the long stark room; two lanky angels and a modernist dove of peace in blond wood perch behind the altar.
Twenty minutes after the Sunday service was supposed to start, about 70 inmates in casual street clothes sit quietly in the pews. A bulldozer of a man turns and smiles at me. Other men nod encouragement.
Volunteers from a church in Queens, dressed in matronly suits and hats, begin the service with gospel songs, rousingly received, and a little preaching; a middle-aged woman wails agonizingly off key into a microphone, to grateful applause. The lead volunteer asks the congregation: ?Are you ready to hear the man of God?? They are.
The Reverend Winston Cato steps up to the pulpit. A stocky man with gold wire-rimmed glasses, dressed nattily in a cobalt shirt, yellow tie, and navy suit, the Caribbean native addresses that Sunday?s newcomers: ?I want you to know our objective here. It?s not just to feel good for a day. I?m not involved in that foolishness. We have a long-term goal. While you?re here in C-95, we want to impact your lives with truth.?
And what follows is as unvarnished an analysis of crime and incarceration as any moralist could hope for. He starts: ?If you go back to the streets the way you came here, you will fail.?
The pews erupt: ?Yes!?
?One of the reasons why recidivism is so high?you go back disrespectful. You have no respect for the law. If you go back with the same attitudes, the same mentality, you will have the same results.?
Cato talks about building an effective prayer life, based on patience and a personal relationship with God. Then he returns to the concrete.
?You men need to know that when you go back on the streets, there are things you?ll have to face, disappointments. The world outside is not going to be so welcoming. Doors will slam in your face. Every opportunity will be given to you to mess up again. And the moment you get into that realm of thinking: ?I?ve got to do what I have to do,? you?ll be right back here again.? The inmates break into applause regularly, hands raised, shouting. Cato is reaching his climax, describing Daniel?s terrifying vision of the spirit realm. ?Are you listening to me??
?Yes!!?
The chaplain is pacing back and forth, his arms cutting the air. ?You need a prayer life. We want you home whole. When you go back, your homeboys will still be there.?
?Some of them,? a listener mutters.
?You?ve probably sharpened some of your skills here,? Cato chuckles. ?Someone has told you: ?I know how to do it without getting arrested.? It?s a lie?because he wouldn?t be here if he did. We need you to change your lives and stop this revolving door.?
Cato steps up to the microphone on the pulpit. ?I want you to stand on your feet now.?
The crowd rises instantaneously.
?This is not the God kind of life. Are you satisfied with jail, being locked in here so you don?t have to be responsible? Getting three meals a day? That?s not living; that?s existing. God wants you to live, to go to your families. They need you outside. I see 12- , 13-year-old boys hanging out on the street at night. ?Where?s Daddy?? they?re asking. You?re no help to anybody until you get your lives together.?
The congregation is clapping and shouting ?Amen!? Cato concludes the service with a prayer.
Men throng up the center aisle to greet him before returning to their cells. I express my admiration for what he seems to have achieved. Cato is less starry-eyed. ?I?m reaching some but not all,? he replies matter-of-factly. In confirmation, a towering man in a pair of Daniel Libeskind?style glasses, singled out for prayer by the volunteers, tells me sheepishly: ?I?m a frequent flyer here. It gives me a feeling of guilt every time I come back.? Cato says severely: ?I?m sorry to see this guy.?
Reverend Cato?s Rikers Island sermon represents one pole of a lively debate about rehabilitation programs, which for decades were assiduously nonjudgmental. A program currently offered to inmates at Queensborough Correctional Facility is typical. The project, Operation Greenlight, rests on the premise that crime results from flawed decision making. Bad character or a moral deficit is irrelevant. Greenlight aims to teach inmates to reason through all possible consequences of an action before acting; the result will be ?pro-social? (the preferred term to ?moral? or ?ethical?) behavior. If you are contemplating snatching a purse, for example, the relevant issue is not whether doing so would be right or wrong, but what the likely outcome will be for you. If you have considered everything fully, you will probably conclude, ?this will hurt me more than help me.?
Greenlight?s director Tim Williams observes: ?The nice thing about this program, from an ethical standpoint, is that it doesn?t tell them what to think. . . . [The term] ?immoral,? quote unquote, just bothers me for some reason. ?Right and wrong? sounds good, but I almost get to the point, ?Who am I to make those judgments?? ?
This diagnosis of criminal behavior and how to reform it is by no means preposterous. It may well be that utilitarian calculation underlies most observance of the law. But the proponents of faith-based inmate reclamation adamantly disagree.
?You must address the topic of morality,? insists Reverend Cato, in his tiny windowless office. ?Values are very, very important; if they don?t have them, it will be reflected in their decisions.? Pat Nolan, an ex-convict and official with the Prison Fellowship, a national network of evangelical prison ministries, argues that only a complete inner transformation can set a criminal straight. ?There has to be some reason outside the self to retrain your urges. The power of what we do is their relationship with God,? he says.
Yet even the most adamant supporters of religious transformation readily admit that without follow-up in the community, few in-prison epiphanies will keep an ex-offender out of trouble. Newly released inmates need supportive personal relationships to stay straight; that is why the Prison Fellowship has developed its highly promising post-prison mentoring program in Texas.
For now, the faith-based proponents are arguing for a chance to compete on an equal footing with the predominant value-neutral approach. The Prison Fellowship wants the government to allow Christian prisons; civil libertarians are suing to stop the idea. Based on the power of what I saw in the Rikers chapel, we should hope the libertarians lose.
No inmate should leave prison without a birth certificate, social security card, and other documents needed to work. And no inmate should be released without either a job lined up or an appointment with a job-search organization. Tracking both numbers?the rates of documentation and of placement in job activities?would be part of the prison oversight process.
Parole?in the sense of post-release supervision?is another wide-open opportunity for reform. Parole?s primary responsibility is to prevent offenders from recommitting crime, by monitoring a parolee?s observance of such conditions as curfews, bans on certain personal contacts, and requirements to work and to refrain from drug use. Parole officers are expected to check up on parolees a specified number of times at home and at work, and to track them down when they go AWOL. The problem is: no one has tried to figure out systematically what works in reducing recidivism.
When I asked New York State parole officer Candace Benjamin what she thought her supervisors most evaluated her on, I met prolonged silence. Finally, she answered: ?How well you meet your compliance requirements, such as the number of parolees you see in a month.?
Benjamin?s uncertainty is telling. Parole departments do collect data on their officers? activities, such as the number of home or job-site visits they make or urine tests they oversee, but they have not tried to link those data to recidivism. The observation that a particular parole officer has 90 percent of his caseload in a job may spark a mild expression of surprise but no inquiry as to why. The only thing sure to wake up parole supervisors is the re-arrest of a parolee on a highly publicized crime, but even that calamity doesn?t necessarily lead to a rigorous postmortem.
Parole headquarters should develop a Compstat-like system that would allow the analysis of parolee crime patterns and the data-driven comparison of parole bureaus (which are responsible for different geographic areas). Top management would grill area supervisors on their caseload statistics, such as probation violations, re-arrests, drug testing, and job placement and retention. Supervisors who improved community safety and prisoner reintegration would be rewarded; the laggards would not. The federal probation department for the Eastern District of New York, under Chief U.S. Probation Officer James M. Fox, is creating just such a program. Biweekly meetings with the top brass will analyze the relationship between probation department inputs and crime outcomes, and will monitor the response to early crime warnings all the way down the chain of command.
To be effective, parole Compstat will have to measure recidivism according to re-arrest rates, not only re-incarceration rates. In New York State, for example, the parole department does not even know the re-arrest rate of its parolees?or at least, it is not telling. But the re-incarceration rate is a flawed measure of public safety, since many arrested parolees are offered plea bargains for their crimes, which keeps them out of prison.
Parole Compstat should also measure coordination between the parole and police departments. Has the parole officer briefed the relevant precinct about the parole conditions of recently released parolees, for example?whom they are not allowed to associate with, where they are forbidden from going, when they are supposed to be at home? And has the officer responded appropriately when cops discover violations of those conditions?
The other crucial component of reducing recidivism is work. When a criminal gets out of prison, he should be swept up in work-related activity so fast that he won?t know what hit him. ?The best medicine for these guys is to be busy 24-seven,? observes Raul Russi, a former New York City probation commissioner and ex-head of New York State?s Division of Parole. The first 30 days following release are critical to staying straight; ex-offenders with too much time on their hands are more likely to go back to their old haunts and old ways. No one should leave prison without either a job to report to the next day or a placement in an organization that will get him a job.
Job-placement firms need to start by teaching a basic work ethic. ?Corporations are looking for someone who shows up every day and keeps his mouth shut,? says Russi, who founded the nation?s first work program for ex-offenders. ?But with the offender population, shortcuts are their problem, structure is their problem. Being someplace at 9 am every day, it?s not what they want to think about.? Job programs should report no-shows to their parole officer at once. Since for many parolees, drug use will torpedo reliability, employment firms, as well as drug treatment providers, should administer frequent and random drug tests.
Every ex-offender?s promise to ?seek and maintain employment? as a condition of parole is a powerful tool to mold behavior, but parole officers almost never enforce this condition?largely, they explain, because few judges will send anyone back to prison for not working. As a result, currently only 53 percent of parolees in New York City are working. Parole departments must start taking work compliance seriously, using such intermediate sanctions as spending a weekend in jail or facing stricter curfews to enforce work obligations.
If, after a good-faith effort, an ex-offender really cannot find a job, the state should require workfare, accompanied by an ongoing job search. A workfare assignment will help the parolee develop habits of punctuality and persistence, and earn a job recommendation from a supervisor. To avoid the inevitable denunciation from the Left of re-creating ?slavery,? the state could pay workfare participants a stipend. Private groups, like the Doe Fund, already offer subsidized cleaning, maintenance, and building-rehab work to ex-cons; the state would only be replicating a proven model.
Current criminological thinking is right about one thing: ?aftercare? is essential to keeping ex-offenders out of trouble. A universal and strictly enforced work requirement is industrial-strength aftercare; but the ideal, boutique-version aftercare would be a mentor for each parolee. Though the prison graduates I spoke with were Ayn Randian in their assertion that it is individual will that determines whether someone returns to a life of crime, in fact the personal connections that ex-offenders have or make play an equal role in keeping them out of trouble. The fear of disappointing a mentor can be an enormous motivator. Byron Johnson, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania, recalls asking one ex-con how he had stayed out of prison. He replied: ?My mentor used to come in the middle of the night if I needed a ride to a job interview?I couldn?t let him down.?
The ex-offender Johnson interviewed belonged to a pioneering Texas program, the InnerChange Faith Initiative, run by the Prison Fellowship. The program runs a faith-based prison, pervaded with Christian worship and work, followed up with mentors recruited from local churches for each ex-inmate. A soon-to-be-released study suggests that the initiative greatly lowered recidivism. Program officials readily concede that they don?t know whether this success results primarily from the Christian aspect of the prison or from the mentoring relationship, or if secular mentoring could achieve similar results. With or without the faith component, policymakers should start thinking how to multiply such role models for ex-inmates.
In the meantime, job supervisors often serve as informal mentors. Sometimes they even try a little personal counseling. Sheldon Flatow, manager of a sheet-metal factory in Queens, says he tries to ?teach mathematics? to his work-release employees: ? ?With one paycheck, you can?t have nine children with eight different girlfriends,? I tell them. ?You can?t keep doing this.? ?Oh yes we can,? they answer.? But some glimmer of understanding may sink in.
Trying to prevent convicted felons from committing more crimes raises profound questions of character, habit, and the limits of social intervention. Sometimes only age (otherwise known as ?prisoner menopause?) can make criminals go straight. But there is reason to think that the agencies that supervise convicts during and after prison can bring down recidivism, if work becomes a non-negotiable condition of parole. In addition, if the jobs of prison and parole officials depend on making improvements in public safety?if every re-arrest prompts them to deep analysis of what went wrong?we might in short order see some startling innovations in post-conviction crime control.
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