Programs target revolving door

By the time he was in high school, Albert Barber was a heavy drinker.

He drank cough syrup when he couldn’t get his hands on anything else.

Heroin was next. When he reached his 21st birthday, Barber was addicted to anything and everything he could get his hands on.

He spent 14 years inside prisons in four states after being arrested on drug-related charges. But even after he was released from prison, his habit was still going strong. Having spent most of his adult life addicted to drugs and alcohol, Barber didn’t know how to function without them.

“The problem lied in my thinking,” Barber said. “I had to go through a change.”

The 56-year-old man is an example of a typical offender. He had been abusing drugs longer than he had been sober, and he didn’t understand how life without drugs worked. Locking him up prevented him from harming others, but it didn’t change his way of thinking.

At a time when the recidivism rate includes more than half of the offenders, officials are realizing that simply locking up offenders does little to help them learn from their mistakes. They have begun trying new approaches to keep the numbers down.

In Lake and Porter counties, they are taking another look at the punishment process, analyzing the prisoners to make sure they are targeting all of their problems, and pressuring the offenders and ex-offenders to talk about their issues rather than simply passing through the system.

It was through these methods that Barber finally kicked his habit.

The approaches used in Porter and Lake counties vary. In Porter, officials are trying to analyze the offender as a whole, treating every risk factor. In Lake County, offenders and ex-offenders are urged to meet and mingle, openly discussing their problems in and out of prison, leaning on each other for support.

But in both instances, the idea is the same.

“It’s a more holistic approach,” said Amesha McDonald of Porter County’s PACT, a community corrections-based agency that provides offender services.

That, too, is the goal of a new in-jail program.

Sheriff Roy Dominguez has announced plans to use state money from the misdemeanant fund to underwrite an educational program for inmates.

The Community Orientation Re-entry Program will provide about 50 prisoners this year with schooling and job training for the final three months they are incarcerated at the facility and for the first nine months they are free.

The program will be administered by Edgewater Systems for Balanced Living at a cost of $4,500 per inmate per year.

The statistics

The problem of how to condition offenders on how not to re-offend has been a long and steady battle, with reoffenders appearing in staggering numbers. In 2002, the latest statistics available, 41 percent of state parole discharges were returned to jail or prison, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The state of Indiana doesn’t formally track its recidivism rate because when people cross state lines, county lines and division lines, it’s hard to keep track of everyone. But Mark Murphy, director of operations for Lake County Community Corrections, estimates that about 70 percent will return.

There were 24,244 adults incarcerated in Indiana last year, according to the Indiana Department of Correction. Ninety-nine percent of those will be released eventually, but if nothing is done to curb the turnaround, the battle will never end.

That’s why Murphy decided to create a program in which ex-offenders, like Barber, to lean on each other for support, returning to the correctional facility to discuss their problems. Many people may assume that when a group of ex-offenders meet once they’re out of prison, they will get into trouble, but Murphy had more faith in the inmates. He also realized how easy it would be for offenders to go back to bad habits. When they leave prison, they typically return home to situation similar to the one they left.

So Murphy realized he would have to teach the offenders how to think about their actions before acting. They need to listen to stories of offenders in order to understand how bad habits begin, he said.

Positive Impact

Together, the group of about three dozen men — some white and Hispanic, but the majority black — don’t look any different than those attending a mundane after-work meeting. They gather in a circle on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, wearing jeans and T-shirts. But the fact that they’ve all served time yet are returning to the correctional facility to talk is a rare feat. Some haven’t been out longer than about a month, but they faithfully come back, using each other to support their decision to become clean.

“I saw a need for this,” Murphy said. He began the program in 1992, but it quickly disappeared when he switched jobs and worked for the Sheriff’s Department for eight years. He returned to Lake County Community Corrections five years ago, and his group, Positive Impact, has been back in full force since May.

They meet twice a week in the recreation room at the facility. Most of the men are ex-offenders, but Murphy also invites current offenders who reside in the building to attend as well. Notices about job openings are announced, and fliers about the positions are distributed to those who haven’t found themselves a career yet.

Sometimes a pastor or an inspirational speaker will attend to speak before the group. Sometimes it will be a representative from Narcotics Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous. But at the end of the meetings, the men have a chance to speak, to share their stories about their problems. While the meetings are voluntary, the men surveyed said they would never miss a session.

Barber said he comes twice a week in addition to his Narcotics Anonymous meetings and his full-time job as an HIV/ AIDS counselor at the Edgewater Systems for Balanced Living in Gary. On a recent Tuesday evening, he attended the Positive Impact meeting wearing a preppy blue-and-white sweater, pressed pants and shiny black shoes. When he spoke, he spoke loudly, his voice echoing like that of a minister. He had a story to tell and he wanted to speak so others would listen.

“Once upon a time when I was locked up, a seed was planted,” Barber said. “I realized I had a problem with drugs. But it didn’t happen like that,” he said, snapping his fingers to emphasize his point. “It’s an attitude problem. You have to do something different.”

Once Barber figured out how to help himself, his mission became to help others who were lost, who didn’t know how to pull themselves out from under the allure of drugs.

“At one time, I was part of the problem. Now, I take pride in being part of the solution,” he said. Barber was sitting at the front of the meeting circle, taking on the role of a voluntary role model for the other men who were recently released. While Murphy was the creator of the group, he sat on the outskirts of the circle, letting the men take the lead and focus the direction of the meeting on whatever topics they need on a given evening.

Charles Blacknell, a 41-year-old from Gary who spent the past 20 years in prison, wanted to talk about his freedom and the temptations that could come along with it. He’s been out for six months, and while he embraces every second of freedom, he said it could be difficult.

“It’s a weird transition,” he said. “I ain’t got nobody breathing down my neck telling me when to eat, sleep and go to the bathroom.”

Dealing with the transition is one of the primary goals of the group.

“The longer you’ve been incarcerated, the longer it’s going to take to prepare them,” said Robert Hinojosa, executive director of Lake County Community Corrections. One time, Murphy put a phone in front of a man who was recently released.

“He didn’t know what to do,” Murphy said. “He had been incarcerated so long, he had only seen rotary phones.”

That’s why the correctional facilities pressures the inmates to attend the Positive Impact meetings. There, they can speak with recent releases about what’s next.

But even with the help, it’s hard.

Jeff Carew, 45, of Munster was released from jail two months and one week before he spoke publicly about his problems.

“What I was and what I still am is a drug addict and an alcoholic who chooses today not to use,” he said. And while he said he always will be an addict, he grasps onto the support of his friends, the other ex-offenders, to convince him to stay sober.

“I gotta remember that it would be very easy for me to be back in a place like that or worse if I decided not to think anymore,” Carew said. “But Positive Impact gives someone a ray of hope — just knowing the fact that there was people who cared.”

Key concepts

Yvette Salinas, parole supervisor for the Indiana Department of Correction in Gary, said the program follows a key concept.

“It’s not all about punishment,” she said.

While the offenders usually did something very wrong to land them in prison, Salinas said it’s their thinking process that put them there, not their desire to do the crime.

“You get an understanding of the years and years and years that they’ve been thinking wrong,” she said. “Someone might say, 'I just got paid and I just worked really hard for two weeks. I should be allowed to go out to the bar and spend my money that I made.’ ”

Salinas explains to them, “It should be your right to save money. If you ask an offender when they were the happiest, it’s not going to be when they were strung out on drugs and alcohol.”

That’s why McDonald of Porter County is working with PACT to create a new program to help the offenders. Currently, judges typically recommend programs to help offenders target a specific problem. For example, someone with a domestic violence history will receive anger management classes. But that doesn’t help much if the offender also has a drinking problem that isn’t being treated.

So PACT is creating an assessment program whereby offenders will be evaluated to determine their host of risk factors. If the evaluation reveals that the offender is an alcoholic who is violent and has a poor peer influence, PACT can help him with all his issues.

“The obvious goal,” McDonald said, “is to reduce their level of risk to reoffend. We’re increasing public safety.”

Post-Tribune