The man who helps jailhouse alcoholics
At age 81, Arthur Pratt ought to be receiving the honors and awards. But it's typical of his style to give them away, on behalf of alcohol abusers in the jail system.
He honored Marion County Sheriff Frank Anderson this past week with the first Life Effectiveness Training to Indiana award. Anderson has been supportive of the efforts of Pratt's LET program to help inmates with alcohol and drug abuse problems.
Anderson inherited an overcrowded jail in winning the office in 2002, and Pratt has been offering a remedy for several years.
The LET program offers inmates an unusual mixture of Alcoholics Anonymous, in-your-face role playing and Christian faith. Indirectly, it has helped keep the overcrowding from becoming worse than it is. About 65 to 75 percent of the men who endure the training don't return to jail.
Addiction to the bottle is a tough problem. Relapses are often part of the recovery process. Occasionally someone like President Bush quits the bottle and never goes back. But his story is unusual. Plenty of alcoholics make three steps forward, only to fall back a couple.
Pratt has found a winning combination that has attracted national attention. Sen. Richard Lugar has obtained federal funding to make jail treatment available across the country, and programs similar to Pratt's have started in several other counties in Indiana. Jim Reidelbach, for example, is a recovering alcoholic and director of expansion for Life Effectiveness Training programs in Warren and Monroe counties.
Followers of Pratt's work have noted his unusual ability to encourage others to join him in this effort that offers little in the way of monetary rewards or prestige.
Sarge Visher, chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Julia Carson, sees Pratt's desire to honor the sheriff as part of an unusual skill. "It's part of his wonderful way of reaching out to others and encouraging them to come along," he said at the luncheon. "Only the best do it that way. It's the element of leadership that involves multiplying your efforts. It's true leadership. There's a selflessness to it, and that's maybe the rare part with Arthur."
The sheriff has noticed the characteristic. "He's always thinking about others instead of himself," Anderson said.
Politically, Pratt cannot be pigeonholed. His luncheon attracted both Democrats and Republicans. He sounds liberal in calling for federal aid to help alcoholics in local jails. But he sounds conservative when teaching personal responsibility to alcohol abusers.
The challenge behind his approach is whether counties can find anyone with Pratt's dedication to duplicate his approach in other local jails. He thinks such people are there, especially those with a background in Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet he's not retiring. "I'm not dead yet," he says, noting that he still leads three groups a week in the jail annex.
President Bush has made compassionate conservatism a national issue and given a new angle on social issues for Republicans by calling for faith-based answers to problems such as alcohol abuse and drug addiction. In Indianapolis, Arthur Pratt could be honored as the founder of compassionate conservatism, starting his jail program and other efforts to help alcohol abusers and the homeless in the late 1960s.
But he shies away from titles or honors for himself. He's too busy trying to honor other people for joining in his efforts.
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