In Northern Virginia, Group Provides Alternatives to Revolving Prison Doors

By Darien Bates

In 2002 the inmate population of federal and state prisons and jails exceeded two million for the first time, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 2003, the latest date for which figures are available, the population of these institutions was calculated at 2,085,620; an estimated 482 inmates per 100,000 people in the population. Those either incarcerated or under some correctional supervision numbered nearly seven million, a stunning 2.5% of the entire U.S. population.

Of those incarcerated and released, the national estimates are that two-thirds will return to prison, either as a result of committing new crimes, or from technical violations, such as missing a meeting with a probation officer, or failing a drug test.

But while recidivism statistics have become an easily quotable part of the failures in the prison system, there are those working to prove that the revolving prison door is not an unavoidable certainty.

Offender Aid and Restoration (OAR), founded in Virginia and made up of eight local affiliates, four of which are in Virginia, is a loosely knit collection of non-profit agencies working on finding alternatives to incarceration and solutions to the cycles of crime in which offenders return to the streets, only to re-offend.
With the 1980s came the birth of new “tough on crime” policies that sought to control escalating crime rates and perceived leniencies in the criminal justice system. The new laws sought to reduce crime by creating mandatory sentencing and guideline-based sentences.

The crackdown led to an unprecedented rise in incarceration. In the 15 years from 1980 to 1995, the population of those incarcerated in jails and prisons exploded from 330,000 to 1.5 million. Today the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, recently surpassing Russia.
The effectiveness of these policies in fighting crime has long been disputed. Since they were instituted, the number of violent crimes like murder and armed robbery has consistently decreased from year to year. But critics of the policy argue that the changes were the result of an improving economy, a constrained drug market, and stepped up community policing efforts.

Either way, the increase in prison populations has come with a steep price tag. The cost to house and feed a single inmate in a federal prison is almost $30,000 annually. Total expenditures for correctional institutions from local to federal institutions exceeded $167 billion in 2001, the last year with statistics available from the Bureau of Justice.

Moreover, with offenders consistently returning to prison following release, the costs continue to rise.
David Manning, executive director of the Arlington County OAR, which covers the cities of Alexandria and Falls Church, talked with the News-Press about restorative justice and the organization’s efforts to make its work a mainstay in the criminal justice system.

Manning talked about his organization’s views on the two contrasting philosophical approaches to imprisonment, retributive justice and restorative justice. In retributive justice, Manning said, the criminal justice system stands in for the victim and seeks to meet out a punishment equal to the damage done to the victim. He said that this “eye for an eye” approach, while intuitively obvious, does very little to actually address the wrongs committed.

Instead, restorative justice creates a three legged cooperative between the community, the victim and the perpetrator of a crime, to help expunge some of the damages.

The most prevalent form of restorative justice is community service. Rather than putting an offender away for a period of time, he or she is instead required to pay back his crime in service to the community.
While Manning said this is the face of restorative justice to the community, there are other ways in which OAR practices restorative justice that have less obvious benefits to the community, yet have the potential for a more profound effect, overall.

By offering programs for inmates of Arlington Corrections to help them with everything from substance abuse to computer and vocational training, OAR provides the tools by which offenders can provide for themselves after leaving jail, without having to fall back on their previous criminal behaviors.

While some argue against these kinds of services, calling them a waste of money and an undeserved luxury, Manning said that the programs hold those convicted of a crime even more accountable for their actions by giving them the ability and the responsibility to fully make up for their past transgressions.

Carla Taylor, until recently the director of the Fairfax County OAR which was retitled “Opportunities, Alternatives and Resources” in 1998 to more specifically represent the services provided, said that the work tries to expand the options for those who end up in the criminal justice system in order to help the entire community upon their release.

“If we can prevent one other victim, we’ve done our job,” she said.

Recent research indicates that the programs at OAR have contributed considerably to improving the lives of those released from jail and have definitely helped reduce recidivism.

Dr. June Tangney, a professor in the Psychology Department at George Mason University, conducted a study on 500 inmates at the Fairfax County Jail. Using a series of psychiatric evaluations, Tangney looked at criminal tendencies in inmates prior to enrolling in programs at OAR, and what the OAR programs did to affect those tendencies.

Tangney, an expert in the effects of shame and guilt on behavior, was interested in how those emotions can be assessed in inmates and how they affect recidivism, a subject she said was largely unstudied before she started her research. “There was an assumption that they didn’t feel these things,” Tangney said.

In her extensive research of guilt and shame, Tangney determined that the two emotions are dramatically different and result in different types of behavior. She said that guilt is a sense of responsibility for a particular negative action, while shame is related to a feeling of a flawed self. While a healthy level of guilt can lead to people making amends for their actions, shame often leads to depression, self pity, and substance abuse.

Tangney expected that by assessing these two emotions she could better determine the propensity toward criminal behavior among inmates.

But as she worked with the OAR staff, she was introduced to a set of beliefs that were even better indicators of the likelihood of re-offense than either shame or guilt.

While they didn’t speak about them in scientific terms, people who worked with inmates were aware of certain behaviors that inhibited positive behaviors. Tangney refers to these traits as “criminogenic beliefs,” a set of five modes of thinking that make a person less socially functional.

She defined the five traits as being (1) a negative attitude towards authority, (2) a sense of entitlement, (3) an inability to accept delayed gratification, (4) a failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions, and (5) a lack of appreciation for the impact of crimes committed, and committed against them.

Through a 25 point evaluation, Tangney has figured out how to identify the prevalence of criminogenic beliefs, and from tracking those inmates whom she evaluated, she has found it remarkably accurate in determining recidivism.

Her test provides the possibility for quick and inexpensive testing. While another evaluation, the Hare Psychopathy test, accurately measures criminal tendencies, it is expensive and requires extensive training to administer. By contrast, the Tangney test has been conducted by her students as part of her study.
Also, the focus on criminogenic beliefs, rather than on background information used in the Hare Psychopathy, establishes criminal beliefs as being more malleable than previously thought, something that Tangney’s study has already started to prove. This is crucial to the rehabilitative work done at OAR.
Following the progress of inmates through to their release, Tangney has seen how criminogenic beliefs can be altered through the efforts of programs like those at OAR. These programs help instill a healthy sense of responsibility and even guilt about the inmates’ actions, then provide the tools through which inmates can make amends.

One notable thing Tangney discovered was the lack of criminogenic beliefs in many people imprisoned for drug possession and use. While the War on Drugs has stepped up the incarceration of drug users, Tangney said that few of the people she has studied arrested for drug possession, show traits that would make them dangerous to the public, and would benefit much more from treatment than incarceration.

Still, the main focus of Tangney’s study has been the work of the Impact of Crime Program, a three month long program that introduces inmates, convicted of any number of crimes, with the victims of crimes, in order to give them a sensuous appreciation of the consequences of their actions.

Brandon Cosby, who runs the program for Fairfax OAR, said that many of the inmates don’t genuinely realize that the crimes they’ve committed have had a profound impact on the lives of victims, especially when the crime didn’t result in direct physical damage.

For example; while they might believe that a house burglary was a relatively benign crime, they don’t realize the psychological damage done to a person whose personal space was violated and no longer feels safe within the confines of their own home.

To help them see the results of their actions, Brandon arranges a series of speakers who come in and talk with the inmates about how they were victims of similar crimes, everything from domestic violence to drunk driving.

The program has four goals:

• The first is to establish empathy in the inmates. Despite the fact that they have volunteered to be there, participants in the program often start closed off. Through the presentations, they come face to face with people affected by crimes similar to theirs. While the victims are different people than those affected by the actions of the specific inmates, Brandon said they effectively make the connection, and often start to accept the idea of their responsibility.

• The second step is to open the inmates’ vision beyond their immediate reality. Cosby used an example of a woman who complained that she had been arrested simply for holding a spoon and an empty plastic bag. But working with her, Cosby got her to see the bigger picture and how her addiction to heroine affected the rest of her life beyond that single arrest.

• The third step is making connections with the community. Cosby tries to show how, rather than being isolated and alone, the inmates are part of the overall community and that they are a necessary part of a healthy world that includes their families, their neighbors and the victims of the crimes they committed.

• The final step is a service project that the inmates work on to help pay back some of the damages they caused. In one of the projects, inmates designed and sold shirts that spoke out against domestic abuse, and then donated the profits to a local shelter for battered women.

Brandon said that by the end of the program, most participants gained a different perspective on their crime and their relationship to society.

The program has been much more successful than Cosby originally expected when he started working at OAR in 1999, coinciding with the beginning of the Impact of Crime program. When he first started, he was worried about whether the inmates would participate. Since then he has learned not only how to enroll people but also how to challenge them when necessary.

He said that many of the people he works with will try to divert responsibility for things they’ve done. Many say they “caught a new charge” instead of admitting that they committed a crime. After years of working with inmates, Cosby doesn’t let them get away with rephrasing things to relieve themselves of the guilt of the crime. “You don’t catch a charge like a cold,” Cosby said. Like the whole program, the change in focus makes participants aware of their own responsibility.

The program has had some unexpected benefits. While it was designed to help the inmates, victims who have spoken at OAR have often come away feeling like they resolved something in their lives. They are able to face a person who, although not the exact perpetrator, can symbolize that person, and it allows the victim to make their peace with them.

“Instead of separating people, it brings them together,” Cosby said.

Just as perpetrators of crimes tend to objectify their victims in order to avoid the fact that they are hurting real people, so too does society objectify criminals. Rather than facing the human being who committed a crime and working with him, society’s response is to put up a wall around him and forget him.

Cosby said that while there are some who may never be helped by any program, most of the people he has worked with in the Impact of Crime program know they need to change and want to be different, but when they face a world they don’t understand they find themselves reverting to an old lifestyle.

“Not all of them can do it. It’s too scary and too frightening,” he said. “More than anything else what we’re trying to do is change beliefs.”

Other programs at OAR try to add practical help to the belief changes initiated in the Impact of Crime program.
John Canova has volunteered at OAR as a mentor for seven years, and during that time, has worked with 22 people who have come from all sorts of situations and backgrounds.

Canova works with each person to figure out what can help them pull their lives back together. It’s a combination of providing perspective and practical assistance, and each case.

When he first starts working with someone, he will ask them three questions: What are the five most important things to you? What are five things you want to accomplish while in jail? What are five things you need to do after released?
In those three questions, Canova tries to determine the inmate’s priorities and how he can assist them in reaching the goals and help pull them out of the lifestyle that has landed them in jail.

For some, the answers are easy. One he is working with presently says that he wants to be an architect, and his goal after being released is to go to school. Canova has done everything possible to get him information about the profession and what the life of an architect is really like. Canova doesn’t want to discourage him, but he also doesn’t want to give him a false idea about the profession and the difficulty in attaining the goal, only to find after release that the life isn’t for him, leading to a return to bad habits.
Other times the answers aren’t so easy. Canova remembers one man he worked with who had committed a serious violent offense, and rather than being released shortly was going to be sent down state to a higher security state prison, to serve a long sentence.

For him, Canova felt that practical assistance was going to be of very little use. Instead he worked to reconnect the man with his mother, from whom he had become estranged as a result of his criminal activity. Canova understood that in the coming years it would be personal connections that would be most important to the man as he dealt with the challenges of long-term incarceration.

“It’s not a waste of time if he can reconstruct himself emotionally. He’ll be better prepared to face situations in jail or later upon his eventual release,” he said.

As he has worked with each of the 22 people who have come into his life as part of his mentoring, Canova has learned a little more about humans that are discarded in the criminal justice system.

“There are some bad apples. They’ll never get to us, and we’ll never get to them,” Canova said. But the majority are available and eager to find a new life for themselves, something Canova said, is better they do at a young age than later in life.

“It creates some momentum and you’ve got to hope that momentum will be self perpetuating,” he said.
For the staff at OAR, that belief in redemption is part of what keeps them going, year after year, in the face of resistance from both inmates and society, who still feel that change is just a vain hope.